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.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
10-04-2007 @ 4:50PM
rndmnme said...
Think if Google.com got deleted. Economies would crumble.
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10-04-2007 @ 5:53PM
Christina Warren said...
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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10-05-2007 @ 9:38AM
julian said...
ahhh thats great
funny
whoever did it
props
Reply
10-05-2007 @ 11:00PM
Steven Ashley said...
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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