The Feds Didn't Listen, Now *.ca.gov Disappeared

One week after I warned that U.S. government officials need to take serious look at improving their security procedures in FBI Investigating Unisys For Not Preventing Hacker Intrusion and Gap Analysis - Blame It On The Contractor, the news is out that after a hacker diverted traffic from Marin County California's website to a porno site. A federal government employee accidentally deleted the ca.gov domain when trying to fix the problem and it took 7 hours to recover from the problem.

And when I say the ca.gov domain, I mean the entire *.ca.gov domain, that means all California Government related websites were down from your local DMV to governors Schwarzenegger's office for 7 full hours.

I really have to wonder what those security procedures are, after this latest gaff. Isn't the first rule of administrating anything in I.T., before making a change, make a backup copy in case you screw up whatever your changing. And the second rule, know how to restore from your backup.

The employee evidently did not know one of those rules since the reason it took 7 hours to recover, because it happened at the end of a work day, it took that long to find someone who knew how to recover from the error.

Last week, in response to news of Chinese hackers had broken into Defense Department computers, I said:

The U.S. Government needs to wakeup the severity of the security problems we are currently having and be made aware just how terrible they could get. Then government needs to get serious in mandating information security protocols on sensitive material both public and private.

Until they do, I know I'm going to sleep a little less secure at night, how about you?

How much worse to these accidents need to get, than taking down all the governments websites of the countries largest state, and no, I'm still not sleeping very well.

For more on the latest security gaff, check out Network Worlds: Federal 'fix' knocks ca.gov for a loop, Download Squads:Federal government knocks California state websites offline and Tech Dirt:Feds Accidentally Turn Off California Gov't Websites.

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