Hackers Shut Down Gospel Website
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By Michael Ireland
Chief Correspondent, ASSIST News Service
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA (ANS) — An Internet ministry which has published more than 40 million evangelistic outreach brochures in more than four decades has become the target of malicious spam, hacking and phishing, causing its operation to shut down.
ACTS International was founded in Australia by Dick Innes, who has been based in Southern California since the early 1980s.
“What God has done and is doing through this ministry is amazing when you realize that there are only two of us on our U.S. staff — my wife, Joy, and myself,” Innes told ANS.
According to Innes, more than 40 million of ACTS printed Encounter outreach brochures have been distributed by several thousand churches, chaplains (military, prison and hospital), other organizations, business people and individuals.
“Ten years ago the U.S. ACTS office changed from hard copy print media to communicate via the Internet and E-mail which has proven to be very efficient and effective,” he said.
“Since going online and starting in a very small way ACTS has received 23,401 salvation and re-commitment to Christ responses. Of these responses 3,507 have been received so far this year and have come from 119 countries that we are aware of.”
A listing of these countries can be seen online at www.actscom.com/news.php#countries.
Innes said that ACTS also publishes a weekday devotional, Daily Encounter, which has over 184,000 worldwide subscribers, and Weekend Encounter which has over 10,000 subscribers.
He continued: “Combined with prayer partners on the Prayer Encounter subscriber list, ACTS has over 200,000 worldwide subscribers. A big percentage of the salvation responses come from Daily Encounter subscribers as many non-Christians are subscribed to this list.
“Unfortunately, however, in the past three weeks our major websites of www.actsweb.org (of which we have several including sites in French and Spanish) have been maliciously attacked.
“Last year a phisher sent out 80,000 spam email messages making them appear that they were coming from an @actsweb.org email address.
“Three weeks ago another phisher attacked us sending out pornographic spam emails making them appear that they came from an @actsweb.org email address,” Innes said.
“As a result all of the response pages on our ACTS websites were closed down as was the sending out of our Daily, Weekend and Prayer Encounter subscriber emails. In the process of changing to a new server we were hacked for a second time — causing a complete close down of our actsweb.org websites. On the very first day of moving to the new server we were hacked again. And closed down again.”
Innes went on to say: “As of today our tech support team are little-by-little putting online only a small section at a time, making sure that these are as safe as possible from hackers, phishers and spammers.”
He added: “Obviously the enemy hates the publishing of the gospel and Word of God and as technology continues to get more and more sophisticated, we can be sure that these evil malicious people will continue to do all in the power to block the publishing of the gospel. Thus all websites and e-mail services that are doing the work of God are going to need more and more prayer for God’s leading, provision and protection.”
The ACTS main website is www.actsweb.org, which is currently being rebuilt.
Innes concluded: “We are also in the process of setting up a special gospel outreach service for churches to replace our literature ministry that hundreds of churches have used. This web service is specifically designed to communicate to non-Christians and the un-churched with articles that speak to the needs of the average person in today’s society.”
A demo site can be seen at www.goodnewsfor.com .
“Fortunately the Good News websites have not been hacked or attacked,” he said.
Tags: United States
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