Saturday, October 13, 2007

GSA inadvertently deleted the CA.GOV domain

Federal GSA Temporarily Pulls Plug on California Government Domain
"Last Tuesday at about 11 a.m.," said California Department of Technology Services spokesman Jim Hanacek, "we received an e-mail from the federal General Services Administration saying they were deleting the ca.gov domain from their master server." The message however, arrived as an ordinary e-mail, said Hanacek, and went to an e-mail in-box where it was noticed about noon.

When the potential impact of shutting down all the ca.gov Web sites was realized, the issue quickly elevated, and about 2 p.m., the state activated the Emergency Operations Center.

A hacker had evidently redirected traffic from the Transportation Authority of Marin County to a pornographic Web site. Since the federal GSA is responsible for the dot gov domain, they pulled the plug.

Who was the hacker? What sort of investigation is being made. What is the process to pull down the domain for an entire state? We need some answers.

Slashdot discusses.

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