Hackers Broke in Iowa City Government’s Website

The website of Iowa City (USA) government had been hacked in the last week of November 2009 and remained offline for repair on November 29 and November 30 2009.

Gary Cohn, City information Technology Coordinator, stated that an external party had added programming language to "www.icgov.org" that had the capacity to transfer malware - or harmful software - to the systems of those who accessed the website, as per the news by press-citizen on November 30, 2009.

Ryan Kopf, Computer Programming and Web Developer, shares his experience and states that while checking the payment of his bills, he surfed - ICGov.org. Unpredictably, Chrome Browser of Google warned him - Warning: Visiting this site may harm your computer!," as per the reports by The Owl on November 28, 2009. Ryan Kopf is also the owner of Chrono, LC - a website design and development firm.

Cohn further said that he had no idea about the origin of attack, but he claimed that since the City's website was hosted on a server outside of Iowa City, the attack could not arise from a domestic source. But Cohn did not rule out any possibilities that it could emerge from within the city.

As per Kopf, when he looked for the origin code of the icv.org site, it contained scripting from the 318x site, a temporary site made by attackers to launch harmful scripts. The script, which is a small amount of text that informs the browser to use the infected code, would have been injected into the Iowa City website by a sophisticated computer virus.

The reports indicate that everything is repaired now and the City is working to thwart another attack. People can pay bills and fines online via the website. However, officials claim that this is a good example of why people need to be alert when they click on any site.

Although the site was free of the malware, people who tried to navigate it through Google were prohibited entry because of the built-in malware security of the search engine. Users of Firefox web browsers, which use the safety measure of Google, were being taken away from the site on November 30, 2009 afternoon.

Related article: Hackers Redirect Windows Live Search to Malicious Sites

» SPAMfighter News - 12/8/2009