The Barriere and District Chamber of Commerce had a shock earlier this week when their website was compromised by an unscrupulous company that grabbed the sites original domain name when it came up for renewal.
Chamber manager Marie Downing says they had requested the site be renewed automatically, but unfortunately that was not the case, and as a result it was immediately scooped and now forwards to a very vial and disgusting porn site.
However, Downing tells that when the Chamber contacted the company they were told it would cost $10,000 to buy the domain name back!
"The word "extortion" definitely comes to mind," commented a local business owner and Chamber member when she heard this had happened, "You would have to be out of your mind to pay anything to those people to get that web address back."
Downing reports the Chamber has already notified all of their members, the municipality and their associates that their new website address is now:
www.barrierechamberofcommerce.com.
The Chamber's notification says, "In order for this new address to be at the top of the Google Search Engines it takes up to 90 days to propagate and the more times people type it in the navigation bar the quicker it will take effect, DO NOT use the Search Engine bar to find the website as this will take you to the old site. Please make sure to change any links you may have on your websites linking to our previous Chamber site which was
www.barrierechamber.com.
The Barriere Chamber's website was actually only out of commission for just over a day. Their web pages are all back under the new website address and Downing says its now back to business as usual.
If there is a message here for others with websites of their own it is to double check and triple check that you make sure your domain name cannot be compromised.
