The website of Shincheonji, a minor Christian sect in South Korea linked to more than half of the country’s confirmed novel coronavirus cases, was hacked at 9:48 a.m. Wednesday for around 10 minutes and multiple times in the afternoon.

The website was built Feb. 21 to debunk what the group called fake news about the religion and the new coronavirus.

The Q&A section of the website showed a pop-up message saying, “A middle school student hacked all of Shincheonji’s website” along with a picture of a sitting Buddha statue.

The message seemed to reference an incident in December, when a similar message was shown on a Chosun.com signboard in Busan. In that incident, a middle school student gained access to a network and wrote the message the screen.

On Wednesday afternoon, over 15 posts ridiculing the religious group appeared as notices on the website, leading to the closing of the Q&A page. The large influx of people to the site led to a sudden surge in website traffic, and the site was inaccessible as of 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday.

Some posts mocked Lee Man-hee, the group’s founder and leader, who held a press conference Monday, while others told the administrators of the website to get a grip and the followers of the religion to dance. There was also a post giving the group a Thursday deadline to release a list of all Shincheonji members.

“It is possible to hack just a page on the website. If the website’s security level isn’t high, even a middle school student can hack it with little hacking knowledge using hacking tools that are easily available online,” a cybersecurity company official told The Korea Herald.

Shincheonji has reported the case to the Gyeonggi Nambu Provincial Police Agency, according to media reports.

By Lim Jang-won (ljw@heraldcorp.com)