The Transportation Authority of Marin County, Calif., located just north of San Francisco, had to shut down its website in October 2007 when someone hacked it and replaced the content with porn. The infiltration almost forced the state of California to shut down the larger CA.gov portal.
TAM chief Dianne Steinhauser said that the new website cost $35,000 to build and will require $10,000 to $15,000 in annual upkeep to keep out hackers.
"We are starting afresh," Steinhauser said, adding that she and her tech team have scrubbed all of the new site's pages of any of the adult links that were surreptitiously embedded into them.
The near-shutdown of the CA.gov network endangered many local emergency systems, prompting a public apology from federal officials for the security failure.
A porn ring based in Eastern Europe was blamed for the near-shutdown of California’s sub-domain. The statewide shutdown came so close, that it reportedly prompted a call by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to President Bush.
Steinhauser said that the new site will hit the web in a couple weeks after a few rounds of heavy testing.
