Tony Stewart's Eldora Speedway briefly showed this message around 2:00 p.m. Saturday purporting to be from ISIS. The message appeared in place of its usual graphics, complete with irritating autoplay audio of an Arabic song.
According to Cincinnati.com, the Arabic logo reads, "There is no God, but God."
By 4:25 p.m., Eldora had restored its site back to normal. Per USA Today, no fan or customer information on the website was affected. A statement atop the website now reads:
4:25 PM - America's Favorite Track's website is once again as safe as our $2 beer prices. Thank you to the Darke County Sheriff, FBI & GoDaddy for their quick response.
There was no specific target for the hack. Moerlein Lager House and Montgomery Inn were also victims of the hack, which involved the use of a plugin. Two other companies in St. Louis also reported being hacked by ISIS on Friday morning. The virus containing the ISIS image and sound remained dormant until that specific plugin was unzipped.
Sgt. Tony Royer of the Darke County Sheriff's Office had this to say of the Eldora Speedway hack to Cincinnati.com:
We received a call from the track manager this afternoon and he said that some kind of ISIS logo was on their home website. So they went ahead and contacted their IT personnel and had GoDaddy look into the incident.
Based on their findings, the speedway was not a specific target of the attack. It sounds like this was done by accident.
Oops.
Either way, it's clear that these terrorists hate everything good in this world, including race cars (in particular). That's not going to end well.
Look, we've got race car drivers who use their own yard art for target practice, and that's not even counting race track/shooting range combos like Laguna Seca and/or anyone purporting to be a "Pocket Commando."
Do you really wanna kick that hornet's nest, ISIS?
Speedway owner and NASCAR driver Stewart reportedly wore ISIS's hack as a point of pride. "If there's anybody I'd want mad at me, I guess it would be them," he told USA Today.
According to WHIO, experts are still unsure if these hacks were actually done by ISIS or by someone who thinks emulating a despicable terrorist group is funny.
That being said, anyone who sets music to autoplay on a website is a terrorist in their own right (to my ears), and should be punished accordingly.