[ga] ca.gov get yanked from the DNS

[Joe Baptista <baptista@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In case anyone missed this.

http://www.webwereld.nl/articles/48162/feds-pull-the-domain-name-plug-on-state-of-california.html

Feds pull the domain name plug on State of California

Donderdag 4 oktober 2007, 10:25 - The Federal government pulled the plug 
on the ca.gov Web domain used by the State of California on Tuesday, 
setting into motion a chain of events that threatened to grind 
government business to a standstill within the state.
eKudos MSN Reporter NUjij.nl Geen reacties   Door Robert McMillan 

State IT staffers were able to fix the problem within a few hours, 
narrowly averting disaster, but the situation shed light on what 
observers are calling a shocking weakness in the state's IT infrastructure.
The story behind the shutdown, and how the U.S. General Services 
Administration (GSA) came within hours of shutting down the State of 
California's Internet presence is a complex one, but as with so many 
stories on the Internet, it begins with pornography.
In early September the Transportation Authority of Marin, a ten-person 
agency charged with managing transportation funding in Marin County, 
California, discovered that the servers that handled the agency's Web 
and domain name service had been hacked and were being used to create 
links to pornographic Web sites.
Domain name servers are used to translate the www.website.com domain 
names we type into our browsers into numerical IP addresses, used by 
computers. Together these Domain Name System (DNS) servers form a 
web-like database telling all of the computers on the Internet how to 
find each other. In the case of the Transportation Authority, there was 
one authoritative server responsible for telling all other DNS servers 
where to find computers operating within the tam.ca.gov domain.
The agency spent a frustrating two weeks trying to get its Internet 
service provider, StartLogic Inc., to resolve the problem, said Dianne 
Steinhauser, executive director of the Transportation Authority of 
Marin. Then in mid-September it delegated domain name server authority 
for the Transportation Authority's domain to the ca.gov name server, run 
by the state's Department of Technology Services, she said. That meant 
that the state's servers and not StartLogic's were now responsible for 
keeping the authoritative domain record for tam.ca.gov.
Unfortunately, it also meant that if an outside observer believed that 
the DNS server responsible for tam.ca.gov had been hacked, he might have 
assumed that the ca.gov name server was compromised as well. And that, 
apparently, is where the trouble really began for the State of California.
On Tuesday, at around 2 p.m., the federal organization responsible for 
managing the .gov top level domain pulled the plug on the ca.gov domain, 
according to Jim Hanacek, a public information officer with California's 
Department of Technology Services. The "ca.gov domain was removed as a 
valid address by the federal General Services Administration, who has an 
office that oversees the use of the .gov domain," he said.
Only the GSA knows for sure why this was done, but Hanacek said that the 
problems that had been experienced by the Transportation Authority of 
Marin were behind the move. "Our understanding... is they were seeing 
signs of some redirects over to pornographic sites and that is what 
caused them to shut down that domain."
A GSA spokeswoman did not dispute California's account of what happened, 
but said that her agency was looking into Tuesday's events and "will be 
able to provide an update once the details are gathered."
Security experts expressed amazement Wednesday that the federal 
government would undertake such a drastic move without first trying to 
resolve the problem with the state. "That's hard core, given how much 
stuff there is under ca.gov," said Cricket Liu, vice president of 
architecture with DNS appliance vendor Infoblox Inc. "Maybe they thought 
there was some sort of imminent threat."
Within hours of the GSA's move, the state had begun working with the 
federal agency to reverse the damage caused by delisting the ca.gov 
domain from the world's DNS servers, Hanacek said. Although there were 
some isolated reports of state Web sites being inaccessible or e-mail 
not going through, the disruption caused by the event was minimal and 
things were back to normal by 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday.
Because it takes time for DNS servers to update their records California 
managed to avoid disaster, but if Hanacek's office had not taken action 
within 24 hours, Web access and email to all state agencies using the 
ca.gov domain would have been cut off, Liu said. "It would have been 
crippling."
Hanacek said that the state is working with the GSA to make sure that 
this type of event doesn't happen again. "I'm sure that we'll have some 
processes in place to make sure that the right parties get advanced 
notification of a significant change like this."  [eind]

--
Joe Baptista                                www.publicroot.org
PublicRoot Consortium
----------------------------------------------------------------
The future of the Internet is Open, Transparent, Inclusive,
Representative & Accountable to the Internet community @large.
----------------------------------------------------------------
 Office: +1 (202) 517-1593
    Fax: +1 (509) 479-0084

begin:vcard
fn:Joe Baptista
n:Baptista;Joe
org:PublicRoot Consortium
adr:;;963 Ford Street;Peterborough;Ontario;K9J 5V5 ;Canada
email;internet:baptista@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
title:PublicRoot Representative
tel;fax:+1 (509) 479-0084 
tel;cell:+1 (416) 912-6551
x-mozilla-html:FALSE
url:http://www.publicroot.org
version:2.1
end:vcard