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Marin County Transportation Authority – Malware and Pornography
By Robert | January 9, 2008
Yet again we are hit with a confusing situation involving an official website, pornography and malware. During November 29 and November 30, the Marin Country Transportation Authority web site was hit with the two problems mentioned above. It seems that the problem was due to Marin County’s web host, StartLogic. The real problem stands in the fact that county stopped business relationships with StartLogic in the middle of September. The result was taking their business to a different provider, ValueWeb. On the other hand, even if StartLogic was out of the mix, it seems that a blank placeholder page still remained under StartLogic’s control. The Transportation Authority only learned about this page on November 30. Interesting enough, this meant a stream of malware and pornography from the official .gov web site.
According to Dianne Steinhauser, executive director of Marin County Transportation Authority, no files of theirs was on that page. Even if this was the case, malware started to appear. As soon as they learned about the problem, talks were started with StartLogic to eliminate the web service and it seems that Steinhauser believes that StartLogic is directly responsible for malware. Now the good news is that Marin County tries to change everything and they did admit that they were currently rewriting everything because they were limited, mainly because of how the web site was originally created. It seems that they are actually in the process of changing everything so this is good news. On the other hand, this is the second similar attack to hit the servers of Marin County in the past year. Unfortunately, it seems that this was not a good lesson and something similar happened now. The only good news is that Marin County was not forced to knock everything offline in order to solve the problem, as happened on the first attack.
Topics: On The Web |
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