Hackers Take Down Pennsylvania Government

January 10th, 2008 by Justin Ryan

Your rating: None

After a series of attacks on state government websites last Friday, administrators of Pennsylvania's web sites pulled the plug, rendering the sites inaccessible for hours.

In what sounds like a repeat of October's incident in California, one or more hackers were able to access servers hosting Pennsylvania's state government websites, apparently through SQL injection attempt. The activities were traced to a Chinese-registered domain, and the FBI is now investigating. According to a government spokeswoman, several other states and at least one university were similarly attacked, though the affected states were not revealed.

The state does not believe that any personal information has been lost or any permanent damage done, but characterized the decision to completely remove the sites as necessary to ensure the safety of the site's users.

Read more.

__________________________
Justin Ryan is News Editor for LinuxJournal.com.
Submit a tip: Email IRC

Special Magazine Offer -- Free Gift with Subscription
Receive a free digital copy of Linux Journal's System Administration Special Edition as well as instant online access to current and past issues. CLICK HERE for offer

Linux Journal: delivering readers the advice and inspiration they need to get the most out of their Linux systems since 1994.

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.
Shawn Powers's picture

Hehehe

On January 10th, 2008 Shawn Powers says:

Reminds me of the Transformers movie, "Cut the hardlines!!!"

Because really, whenever I need to take my servers offline, I always resort to using an axe. :)

__________________________

Shawn Powers is an Associate Editor for Linux Journal. You might find him chatting on the IRC channel, or Twitter

Post new comment

Please note that comments may not appear immediately, so there is no need to repost your comment.
The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <pre> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <i> <b>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

More information about formatting options

Newsletter

Each week Linux Journal editors will tell you what's hot in the world of Linux. You will receive late breaking news, technical tips and tricks, and links to in-depth stories featured on www.linuxjournal.com.
Sign up for our Email Newsletter

Tech Tip Videos

See more Linux Journal Videos

From the Magazine

July 2009, #183

News Flash: Linux Kernel 3.0 to include an on-the-go Expresso machine interface! Ok, maybe not, but Linux is definitely going mobile, from phones to e-readers. Find out more inside about Android, the Kindle 2, the Western Digital MyBook II, The Bug, and Indamixx (a portable recording studio). And if you've gone mobile and you been wanting more Emacs in your life then check out Conkeror.


To compliment the mobile we've got the stationary: parsing command line options with getopt, checking your Ruby code with metric_fu, and building a secure Squid proxy. How is this stationary you ask? What can we say? It's not. We just wanted to see if anybody actually read this part of the page :) .


All this and more, and all you have to do is get your hot sweaty hands on the latest copy of Linux Journal.





Read this issue