LONDON — Japanese porn hackers hit a British government website Monday.
The Home Office of the UK's interior ministry found its security homepage embedded with a link to a Japanese porn site when the same link should have redirected to anti-terrorism information.
The department was actually alerted by an Internet user named Mike Riley, who noticed the porn link and informed the BBC, which passed on the information to the government. Riley was trying to find out about the UK's new regulation that took effect Monday, requiring Internet service providers to store details of user e-mails and Internet phone calls.
The actual linked page on the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism site focuses on the interception of reported terrorist communications.
"It was a link from the Home Office website to the Technical Advisory Board, which is an external website," a department spokeswoman said. "It is their website that was hacked and redirected to a porn site. We were alerted today, we took immediate action, we removed the link and we are now investigating."
According to the BBC, the Home Office said the site it had been linked to is no longer functioning and another company has taken over the URL.
