Security News > 2021 > November > Angling (re)Direct: Criminals net website of Brit fishing tackle retailer, send users straight to smut site

Miscreants have hijacked the systems of Angling Direct, diverting traffic from its websites to Pornhub and threatening to wipe its internal data.

The statement says Angling Direct has contacted the law enforcement agencies and the UK's data watchdog, the Information Commissioner's Office.

The oddness showed up on Angling Direct's Twitter feed last night at 22.43 UTC when an individual tweeting from the corporate Twitter account claimed the site had been "Sold" to MindGeek, the company that bought PornHub in 2010, and that the fishing-tackle retailer's customers would be able to make use of a "Premium" PornHub subscription the miscreants had signed up for using an Angling Direct email addy.

Twitter detectives quickly began to speculate that Angling Direct might have used the same password for Twitter as it did for its other systems, and that the passwords were not protected by multi-factor authentication.

In addition to its 39 brick-and-mortar stores that sell all manner of fishing paraphernalia, Angling Direct had 7.4 million people visit its UK website in its fiscal 2021.

"Angling Direct or should that now be called 'Dangling Erect' suffered a DNS redirect... Online level of innuendo is amazing - this was not the sort of rod I was after? And look at the size of that tackle box." .

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2021/11/08/angling_direct/