PERRYSBURG – The FBI is investigating the recent hacking of more than 18 church websites hosted by a
company in the city, in which the sites were deleted and replaced with material advocating conversion to
Islam.
Ryan Leisure, of R Leisure Enterprises, which provides web design and hosting services to a number of
churches and business throughout the United States, said that he was contacted Wednesday night by one of
the churches whose sites he hosts and told something was wrong with the site.
Logging on, Leisure saw that someone had deleted the entire website from the account and put up another
page containing information about Islam and Christians should convert to the religion. It also contained
links for more information, and pictures of the Muslim holy city of Mecca, among other items.
Leisure subsequently received a call from Fallen Timbers Community Church in Waterville, where he is also
a member, telling him the same thing had happened to their site.
"So I started basically looking around the rest of the sites," and found that many more of them
had been hacked in the same way. He said the hacker, who identified himself by the handle "Mr.
Hail" in the posted information, seemed to have been active on the sites throughout the day on
Wednesday.
"I kind of think we kind of caught him in the act," Leisure said, noting that some of the sites
he found had only been partially deleted by the hacker.
Leisure’s company hosts 60 church websites. While Fallen Timbers Church was affected, others in locales
including California, Seattle, Texas, North Carolina and Florida were also hacked.
Leisure went through and removed the hacked information and had all of the affected sites backed up and
live on the internet again within 24 hours.
"It could have been a lot worse than it was," he said.
Leisure noted that the material that was put up by the hacker was not hateful in nature.
However, "it was obviously an illegal thing to do and (I) reported it to the FBI here locally in
Toledo."
The FBI directed him to fill out a report on their website, www.ic3.gov, used to report internet crime.

"We are looking at that right now and really have nothing we can release at this point," said
Dave Dustin of the FBI’s Toledo office in a recent telephone interview.
Leisure performed a Google search for the hacker after the incident, and said it appears that he has
hacked more than 100 sites, and on some of them posted material containing vulgar language aimed at
America.
"I don’t believe he’s in the United States," Leisure said, noting, from information he has
seen, that the hacker may be located in Saudi Arabia.
He said the odd part about the incident was that the hacker had only targeted church websites – in
performing the hacking on Leisure’s company, the hacker would have had access to all of the websites the
firm hosts, but he left the others alone.
"So that was obviously a little alarming when I saw that."
Leisure noted that no particular Christian denomination seemed to be the target of the hacking, and said
his company has never before been affected by hackers.
"This is the first time I’ve experienced it."
He has taken extra measures to prevent this from happening in the future, including performing nightly
backups of the sites he hosts on an additional server.