Bad things lurking on government sites

October 2007

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 pornography and Viagra. Brookhaven is a U.S. Department of Energy lab that specializes in nuclear and high-energy research. 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. Security researchers have called for better awareness and responsiveness for website administrators – especially in the .gov and .edu domains – because of the constant danger those sites face by hackers. Even when outside researchers discover flaws, they have a very difficult time contacting Web site administrators to report the problem, one researcher said. “Everyone has really got to do a better job on securing the Internet. You can’t just put a Web server out there and forget about it any more,” he added.