Skip to Content

Submit your nominations for the Luxist Awards' Best in Decor
AOL Tech

Filed under: Internet, News, E-mail

Federal government knocks California state websites offline

CA.govSometimes 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.

[via Techdirt]

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

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, ...

View more Time Wasters

Featured Galleries

Defective by Design, London: Protest Pictures
Livescribe Store
Microsoft Security Essentials
Chromium Pre-Alpha on CrunchBang Linux
Safari 4 Beta
10 Firefox themes that don't suck
IE8 RC1
Download Squad at the Crunchies After-Party
Download Squad at the Crunchies
WordPress 2.7
Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals
Windows 7 Hands On
Comodo Internet Security
Android First-look: Amazon.com MP3 Store
Android First-look: Twitroid
Google Reader Android
Android Hands-On
Twine 1.0
Photoshop Express Beta
Mozilla Birthday Cake
Palm stuff

 


Follow us on Twitter!

Flickr Pool

www.flickr.com

More Tech Coverage

AOL Radio