Extremist hacker may have been confused ...

By David Watters

Chatham Town

Chatham Town's webmasters believe a bungling jihadi hacker who targeted their website at the weekend may have mistook the Ryman South club for a Premier League outfit.

Stunned officials were forced to take down the club's website for nearly 12 hours in the early hours of Saturday morning ahead of their trip to Tilbury and post a message on Twitter apologising to fans after being confronted by an image of a machine-gun wielding man wearing a gas mask with a message asking: ‘Where is the security?’

Thousands of Western websites have been hit by cyber attacks in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo Paris shootings with a Morocco-based extremist claiming responsibility for targeting the Chats. The hacker also declared 'I am not Charlie' in reference to the massacre of the satirical magazine's staff earlier this month.

The club's site had returned to normal by Saturday night and Steve Archer, one of the site's administrators, told Kent Online that the cyber attack 'made no sense' and that the hacker probably thought he was 'targeting a Premier League club'.

He said: "It makes no sense - we're a part time football club so I'm pretty sure it's just a random attack. Someone told me about 11pm. It must have been quite late as I had been working on it that evening."

He added: "I'm just hoping I've not lost too much information. It's taken me two years to put it together, and I've spent a lot of time on the history section. I've got results on there going back to 1990."

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