Links to porn posted on church's Web site

A hacker posted links to pornographic Web sites on the message board of one of Fayetteville’s largest churches this week. The links first appeared Tuesday evening on the Haymount United Methodist Church message board for its youth ministry. They remained until someone notified the church Thursday morning. The board was then immediately shut down. Dr. Brian Gentle, senior pastor at the church, said the church staff acted quickly and responsibly once informed of the problem with the message board. “We don’t want to give people ideas,” Gentle said. “Obviously, we need to make churches aware this might happen.” Tracy Korff, office administrator at Haymount, said the board was hacked by someone who was able to access the church’s user name and password. Korff, who oversees the main Haymount Web site, immediately deleted the link. Korff said oversight of the message board portion of the Web site was turned over to a member of the congregation recently. She did not identify that person. “An executive decision was made to immediately shut down the board,” she said. “Right now, we are not going to open the message board back up until some very serious considerations are taken,” she said. “We’ll do more research on the security companies provide. We were hacked into because message boards are extremely exploitable.” Korff said the purpose of the message board was for the people involved in the Haymount youth ministry to exchange comments, views and ideas.