Where's My ca.gov?

One big story around here is the death of the 'ca.gov' web sites - all the State of California web sites.

Seems that a few county web pages (Marin county, which is across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco) were hacked by someone who put some redirects to some porn search pages. Just text pages, in this case, but not really a good thing for your local government agency.

Someone in Washington DC got wind of those pages, and immediately went into overreact mode. The response was to shut down every single 'ca.gov' page, and all their email too.

A quick Google of "site:ca.gov" comes up with "about 2,200,000" page hits.

That got the attention of the California State geeks, who managed to get things restored 4-5 hours later.

The folks at Sunbelt folks reported on this several weeks ago (here http://sunbeltblog.blogspot.com/2007/10/marin-county-safe-but-still-not.html , or just start at their blog page and scroll down a bit). (By the way, the Sunbelt blog is a daily stop on my morning web surfing travels.)

But this is not unusual. Just do your own Google search. Try "p*rn xxx site:.gov" (substitute the letter 'o' for the asterisk), and you'll get over 9000 results. Many of those are government web pages that have been hijacked.

Of course, the problem is not just government sites. Which means that, if you have a web page of your own, perhaps some Google searching for offensive terms might be a good idea. You might find that some of your pages have been hacked.