Posted Aug 9, 2012, 2:42 pm
The City of Tucson's website was redirected Thursday. Instead of displaying information on city departments, it showed visitors lists of Google ad links.
The city's IT department is working on the problem, said spokesman Michael Graham, who said users outside the city's network are being sent to another site.
"Users outside the internal City network are being sent to a page other than the City of Tucson home page based upon information on servers not within the City of Tucson's control," Graham said. Email sent to city accounts from outside the system is also affected, he said in a press release.
Graham the city's Domain Name Server addresses were redirected, pointing users to outside web pages instead of the city information they were looking for.
City sites, including tucsonaz.gov and www.ci.tucson.az.us, were all pointed to cityoftucson.org, and the registration for that site apparently expired on Tuesday.
Graham did not respond to phone calls for more information.
Internet registration records show that the registration of cityoftucson.org was updated Thursday morning. The site was listed in the afternoon on domain registration auction site NameJet, with a minimum bid of $69.
Internet domain registrar Network Solutions showed cityoftucson.org as "Pending Renewal or Deletion" in a whois lookup.
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The lapsed registration may have allowed a hacker to gain control of the cityoftucson.org site, and redirect all of the city's web traffic to another server, or the redirection may have been automatically done by the registrar.
"Staff from the City of Tucson Information Technology Department has worked with the City’s service providers to resolve the problem; however, it can take up to 48 hours to propagate to all the internet Domain Name Service (DNS) servers," Graham said.
2 comments on this story
Wow! That sure is a different story that the ADS provided. Thanks.
Oh, please, the website wasn’t hacked.
The domain registration expired. When that happens, the registrar can change the DNS entries to point to a generic web site. This happens all the time.
And when a domain expires, it’s available for someone else to purchase. This also happens all the time.
So stop with the scare tactics. Nothing was hacked.