San Juan County’s Web site was hacked January 15. The county Information Technology department is warning computer users to keep a close eye on their personal data if they accessed the site that day, although it does not appear that any data was compromised.
About 8:35 a.m. Thursday, Jan. 15, 2009 morning the County’s website server, /www.sanjuanco.com, ceased to respond. When the system was rebooted, requests for pages generated an error message which was quickly traced to a line of so-called “snoopware” that had been inserted on each page, apparently by an electronic intruder who worked around the electronic “firewall” on the web server.
“We are fortunate that our pages are set up slightly differently than most, so the hacked-in code would not execute on any of our most-viewed web pages,” said County website manager Stan Matthews. He said it is possible that someone could have directly accessed an archival “.html”page between 8:40 a.m. and 9:00 a.m., but that the county’s home page, department pages, directories and search pages – including the parcel and document search pages, and most others which might have linked to infected pages were offline during that time.
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