Hacker Hits Escambia Tax Collector Site

July 13, 2008

taxcollector.jpg

The Escambia tax collector’s web site was defaced by a hacker on Saturday, and now the site is down.

The text on the site and all of the links were replaced by the text “hacked by mOsted (Turkish) No War”. The statement appeared repeatedly on the site.

By late Saturday afternoon, the tax collector’s office had taken the site offline, making local tax information unavailable to the public.

According to an internet seach, such hacks are typically random in nature where the hacker used an automated process to look  for vunerabilities with the code that makes up a  web site.

The tax collector’s web site is hosted by Escambia County on the same group of servers that serve other county web sites.

Computer hacking can be a felony under Florida law, but most hacks such as this one originate in a foreign country.

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