Calif. government site still serving up malware, porn
By Ed Oswald, BetaNews
December 3, 2007, 4:01 PM
The same Web hosting provider that was found to have allowed hackers into a government Web site in California due to shoddy server security is still causing problems for that county's IT administrators.
The Marin County Transportation Authority was found to linking to sites with pornography and malware, similar to what occurred nearly two months ago.
Marin County severed ties with StartLogic on September 14, however its Web site was found on November 29 to again be serving links to pornography and malware once again, according to Sunbelt Software. While they were removed, they apparently returned briefly again on December 1.
Even though it had switched to a new provider, somehow in some cases web surfers were still being sent to a page still assigned to StartLogic which hackers apparently had access to. According to a representative for the county, StartLogic was working on having the DNS issues resolved.
Marin County's new hosting provider is ValueWeb, and users should be seeing a "Under Construction" page when accessing the URL according to officials. However, attempts at accessing the URL, tam.ca.gov, by BetaNews resulted in DNS errors as of Monday afternoon.
This could be a sign that whatever DNS issue that was sending Web surfers to the old page may be in the process of getting resolved.
StartLogic is apparently still hosting a mail server for the government agency, and the county said it was having no security issues with it. However, following the problems with the hosting provider, the agency purchased its own mail server and plans to soon end its business with StartLogic completely.
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