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Poker room hijacked the domain of a municipal website from Ohio
Indonesian poker room Poker678 (a member of the IDNPoker Network) bought the Lorain County (Ohio) tourism website — visitloraincounty.com and redirected to their site. How and why this became possible, we will tell you in this article.
How did a travel site become a mirror of a poker room?
A curious incident was recently reported in the state of Ohio. The Lorain County Board of Commissioners discovered that authorities had lost control of the website visitloraincounty.com, whose purpose was to attract tourists to Lake Erie.
County Commissioner Matt Lundy said he received a $17.99 renewal notice in February and forwarded it to county administrator Tom Williams, who simply forgot about it.
In his defense, Tom told the Morning Journal that the administration planned to migrate all of its sites to .gov domains, and visitloraincounty.com hadn't been updated in several years (although it featured 60,000 unique visitors per year).
As a result, the domain was sold through GoDaddy within 2 days, and a Chinese hosting service took control of it. Now shows a mirror of the Poker678 poker room.
Why does an Asian room need a US website?
Those in charge of the website will have to justify themselves to the voters for a long time. But another thing is more interesting: why does an unknown poker room from Indonesia need a mirror on a domain strictly attached to the United States?
It's hard to believe that its managers suddenly decided to attract Americans to the tables: to register an account on the site, you must indicate an Indonesian bank account number.
So this is either a trolling or, more likely, a hijacking case in which the hackers will ask for a reward.
According to some media reports, the authorities (strongly interested in recovering the domain) were requested about $1,100; which, of course, is more than $17.99, but somehow not very solid. This version is also supported by the fact that the site still contains Lorain County metadata.
IDNPoker Network rooms are known for many unusual features, but hijacking government websites is clearly not on the list.
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