Filed under: Internet, News, E-mail
Federal government knocks California state websites offline
Sometimes the cure can be more painful than the disease. Case in point: the federal government tried to help a California county website recover from a hacker's attack yesterday and wound up knocking every California state website offline for 7 hours.Here are the details. A hacker had diverted traffic from the Marin County website so that visitors found themselves looking at porn. That's bad. But when the feds tried to lend a helping hand, the accidentally "deleted the ca.gov domain."
While that did prevent users from finding naughty pictures when searching for Marin County services, it also meant Californians couldn't get information about vehicle or voter registration or find contact information for Arnold Schwarzenegger's office. Oh yeah, and California state employees couldn't reliably send or receive e-mail.
By last night everything was restored to normal. but it just goes to show, it's hard to find good help these days.
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
rndmnme said 4:50PM on 10-04-2007
Think if Google.com got deleted. Economies would crumble.
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Christina Warren said 5:53PM on 10-04-2007
Suddenly I feel MUCH better about having my e-mail potentially read by these people. I mean, if they can't fix a redirecion hack without DELETING THE DOMAIN FOR THE MOST POPULOUS STATE IN THE COUNTRY, I'm not that concerned about my conversations concerning my plan to turn Canada into a theme park (which I would rename CanadaLand) being taken seriously.
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julian said 9:38AM on 10-05-2007
ahhh thats great
funny
whoever did it
props
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Steven Ashley said 11:00PM on 10-05-2007
I really have to wonder what the Government I.T. Security procedures are, after this latest gaff. Isn't the first rule of administrating anything in I.T., before making a change, make a backup copy in case you screw up whatever your changing. And the second rule, know how to restore from your backup.
The Fed employee evidently did not know one of those rules since the reason it took 7 hours to recover, because it happened at the end of a work day, it took that long to find someone who knew how to recover from the error.
Last week, in response to news of Chinese hackers had broken into Defense Department computers, I said:
The U.S. Government needs to wakeup the severity of the security problems we are currently having and be made aware just how terrible they could get. Then government needs to get serious in mandating information security protocols on sensitive material both public and private.
Until they do, I know I'm going to sleep a little less secure at night, how about you?
How much worse to these accidents need to get, than taking down all the governments websites of the countries largest state, and no, I'm still not sleeping very well.
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