Mod-Blog is back!!!

Well, it was a long, dark night. But the sun is rising again, and it is the start of a new day!

For those who missed it, about a month ago, Mod-Blog was hacked by some who claimed to be a foreign political activist. He claimed to want to raise awareness of certain international issues... but all he really did was insert Google AdSense links all over the page, and collect the pennies that rolled in. We were not the only ones impacted - there were literally dozens of blogs stolen.

But after a month of waiting patiently for Google's infamous customer service, we're up. We now hope to return to our irregularly scheduled programming.

CA.GOV Goes Down

I can't find an official press release on either California's Department of Technology's website or the U.S. General Services Administration's website, but it appears that for about 7 hours, the ca.gov domain was at least partially down. NetworkWorld has the story. It appears that the Transportation Authority of Marin County had their website get hacked and redirected to a website with pornography. In response, the U.S. General Services responded with too broad a "sword" and deleted the entire ca.gov domain. The proper procedure would have been to notify California's Department of Technology and then take down the site. Apparently, the wrong person or people were contacted. By the time the problem was realized on the west coast, it was after business hours on the east coast. The blame seems to lie with the federal government, though we'll have to wait for the report to here the GSA's response.

Word Document Gives Hackers Access to State Department

This seems amazing to me and yet it shouldn't surprise me with all of the extra features and integration with its other products that Microsoft includes in Office. Apparently, a state department employee opened up a Word document they got in e-mail and it leaked information to hackers.