COMPUTER hackers attacked an Oxford-based charity this week, leaving thousands of people without support.

Website healthtalk.org suffered the cyber attack on Sunday, November 23, and was forced to shut down its system for three days.

Staff believe the attack was by the “Middle East Cyber Army” as their site carried anti-Israel messages as well as images of the war-torn Middle East.

Technical manager Adam Barnett said: “We were completely surprised that we could have been targeted but in some ways it feels unfair because we are a small charity trying to do some good and completely unrelated to the troubles of the Middle East.”

Mr Barnett said the charity, which provides health information, was first notified of the attack on Sunday evening after receiving a tweet about its unusual website design.

But it was not until Monday morning that the team of three realised hackers had hit the site, which is visited 13,000 times a day.

Fears then mounted they had lost 13 years of work, including 25,000 video clips and 3,500 online patient stories about 86 medical conditions. Staff had to rebuild the website from scratch, moving it to a new server and re-importing all of their data from back-ups.

The team, based at Woodstock Road’s Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, got the site back up at about 4pm on Wednesday afternoon.

Mr Barnett said: “It’s upsetting. You can never really stop these things so it is a worry that we will be hacked again.”

Communications manager Jo Kidd said: “The impact of the hack was obviously devastating for us as our aim is to support people who might feel alone in what they are facing.

“This is something that we as a charity feel very passionately about so we were completely gutted to know that these people were coming to us for help, only to find a blank website.”

The attack came less than a week after the site received the Charity Website of the Year award at Good Web Guide’s London ceremony on Monday, November 17.

Ms Kidd said: “It was like a rollercoaster of emotions really because we were so excited and thrilled to win the award.

“And then just less than a week later there was the devastating news that we had lost control of the website and it’s all under threat because hackers have taken over.”

The charity reported the attack to national fraud and internet crime reporting centre Action Fraud. The “cyber army” came under suspicion after charity officials discovered other targeted websites through Google.

Mr Barnett said the website was invaded with messages such as “Free Palestine”.

Similarly hacked websites have messages including, “We are Muslims, Quran is our book, in God we trust, for God we work”.