The U.S. federal government took steps earlier this week to shut down Web sites in California in order to protect the public from hacked Web sites, but new incidents show that the problem is not going away any time soon. On Thursday, compromised pages hosted by the Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Superior Court of Madera County, California, were still hosting inappropriate content. Brookhaven had links that redirected visitors to pornographic Web servers, and the Madera County court site featured ads for porn and Viagra.
The security of U.S. government Web sites has been front-page news in California this week after the U.S. General Services Administration, which administers the .gov top-level domain, temporarily removed California’s state servers from the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure, apparently because of a security problem on the Web site of a small state agency, the Transportation Authority of Marin. Hanacek credits the GSA with doing its job in identifying there was a problem. But he said the agency shut down California’s domain apparently without first consulting any authorities in the state. “It was like using a shotgun to kill a flea,” he said. Forget about terrorists, fight against hackers!