.CA.Gov Site Reinfested, Will They Ever Learn?

Back in September, some sites on on the .ca.gov domain were infected with malware due to lax securtiy standards, now less than three months later it apparently has happened again, check out eWeek.com - Gov Site Reinfested Due to Hosting Provider Sloppiness:

The Marin County Transportation Authority sites that appeared to be serving up pornography and malware yet again Nov. 29-30 were in fact a sloppy residue from the same Web site hosting company that the California government agency thought it heard the last of once it ceased using the provider in September.

The hosting company in question—StartLogic—or its sister company has, in fact, been at the bottom of multiple hacked government sites, including serving up malware-seeded pages for the domain of Plainville, Kan.—a city that registered a domain but never even put up a site.

Dianne Steinhauser, executive director of the Transportation Authority for Marin County, told eWEEK late in the day on Nov. 30 that TAM ceased hosting its site with its previous provider, StartLogic, as of Sept. 14 due to malware-seeding problems that eventually led to the federal government shoving offline Internet and e-mail service for the entire state of California in early October.

Sunbelt Software President Alex Eckelberry said in a post on the night of Nov. 29 that TAM's domain was yet again serving up links that directed users to pages that pushed Trojans and malware posing as a fake codec. Paul Ferguson, network architect at Trend Micro, told eWEEK that as of Nov. 30 all the garbage was still being served up from subdomains on TAM's site.

The tam.ca.gov site was, in fact, not hacked and was not serving up malware, although it displayed a message saying it was under construction. The site is actually being hosted by a new, independent Web host, ValueWeb, and is in fact still under construction, Steinhauser said.

However, even though TAM stopped doing business with StartLogic in September, the Web hosting provider still had an open Web page assigned to the transportation agency. TAM didn't find out until Nov. 30 about the open page, through which the public could access Web services through StartLogic's servers under tam.ca.gov.

For the rest read eWeek.com - Gov Site Reinfested Due to Hosting Provider Sloppiness:

Sphere: Related Content