Local church’s online sermon was hacked, displayed child pornography
Sunday service is a sacred place, one of comfort and joy. For members of Normandy Church, this past Sunday service was invaded.
After trying out Facebook live and Google Hangouts, the church decided to switch to Zoom, a video conferencing tool, to share Sunday sermons. The Zoom meeting was password protected, and the administrator allowed people she knew into the meeting.
While Pastor John Bower began preaching on the Zoom meeting, a hacker displayed child pornography clips on the screen for church members and Facebook Live viewers to see.
“I would say 20 minutes into the sermon, maybe 15 minutes into the sermon all of a sudden the most horrific image I’ve ever seen in my entire life, an actual video appeared that was child pornography,” Bower says.
It turns out, the hacker had found out one of the names of the accepted church members and created a username that was similar so church administrators accepted the hacker in the Zoom meeting.
“Kate is the admin for the whole thing and she had pinned me as the primary video that could be seen,” Bower says. “We lost control of it and then the image came up.”
While Bower says the image was too graphic to explain, he did say the beginning image was of a baby girl. His first reaction was, “Oh no, someone is changing their baby.”
“‘Oh, that’s an accident but whose baby is that?’ My wife told me this later, because she was at home watching it, she said that I shouted, ‘No, no, no, Kate shut it down,’ and I put my hand over the screen so I could stop seeing the video,” Bower says. “I noticed that after a few seconds, I couldn’t see the graphic part of the image or the child at this point, but I knew the image changed and others in our congregation saw the second part of it and said it was even worse [than the initial video].”
The church shut down the Zoom meeting and quickly deleted the live video from Facebook. Less than an hour later, they were on the phone with Zoom trying to figure out what happened.
Bower also reached out to the FBI, Dallas Police and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children where he found out that this was a coordinated attack on multiple organizations. Not only did it affect organizations that posted the Zoom meeting information on social networks but organizations that shared information internally.
“I learned that if you post on MailChimp, that can be found and hacked, but if you were to text or email from your personal email to your people than that’s more private,” he says. “So it seems that it was some what of a widespread hack.”
One of the most tragic parts of this situation is that about six families’ children were also watching the sermon, ranging in age from 5 to 10 years old.
“Some of them, by the grace of God, they couldn’t quite register it, but the parents acted quick enough,” Bower says. But some children were able to register what they were seeing.
The experience has been traumatic for both Bower and anyone who saw the explicit videos. In response, the Normandy church has written blog posts, explaining what happened and resources for trauma.
“We reached out to some counseling programs, one in Austin, the Meier clinic in Richardson and Sparrow House in Dallas, and they gave us a list of books and some trauma-based practices,” Bower says.
Bower and his wife, Kacey, have been explicit that they are not trauma counselors but have put in every effort to share those resources for the congregation. The parish themselves have also put in efforts to reach out and check in on each other.
“We all witnessed a crime, it was the definition of trauma, the presence of malevolence,” Bower says. “Someone told me the definition of both shared trauma and secondary trauma, meaning the trauma wasn’t happening to us but we witnessed it.”
In any group of people, there are people who have experienced sexual abuse or trauma, so this event has especially impacted them. Another tragic fall out from the attack.
“It was really just a horrible invasion of privacy. I don’t mean sacred in the religious sense, but we are literally in our homes, living our lives and it was an invasion,” he says.
Another response from the Normandy church included donating money to the International Justice Mission. The organization supplies recovery kits for children that have been set free from trafficking. They also donated money to a Waco nonprofit, Unbound, that both works to set kids free and to equip communities, business and organizations to recognize child trafficking.
“I just want to advocate and want people to be aware and really bring it to light because it was the most horrific thing I’ve ever seen.”
