St. Louis County, Mo., Takes Down Website to Thwart Hackers

guest · Sep 15, 2020

St. Louis County, Mo., Takes Down Website to Thwart Hackers
An attempted cyberattack against the government systems
September 10, 2020
https://www.govtech.com/security/St-Louis-County-Mo-Takes-Down-Website-to-Thwart-Hackers.html

St. Louis County abruptly took its website down on Sept. 1 because hackers were trying to break in, county officials acknowledged on Wednesday.

Moore did not explain why county officials failed to disclose the cause of the website outage until after an early version of this report was published online on Wednesday.
The County Council’s committee of the whole is scheduled to meet Tuesday to weigh a decision to confirm his appointment.
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A statement from Page’s staff the day of the outage said only that the information technology team had been making modifications to the site and that some content would not be available for two weeks.
Few details were available about the nature of the hacking attempts. The Post-Dispatch learned about it from multiple sources in county government.

“[...] the risk to our residents and businesses and integrity of County systems outweighed the disruption that I knew such a drastic switch would cause.”
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guest · Sep 15, 2020

Hackers tried to slip Trojan viruses into St. Louis County’s website, but never got in, IT director says
September 14, 2020
https://www.stltoday.com/news/local...cle_6a021642-0d7b-5f70-812e-125a67ff8b38.html

St. Louis County government’s information technology staff took down the county website on Sept. 1 after discovering attacks on its server designed to take control of the site, the IT director said Monday.

They were able to respond to the threat before the hackers could succeed, acting IT director Charles Henderson said in an email on Monday. He said no data was lost, compromised, stolen or corrupted in the attack.
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Henderson said the attacks were exploiting a vulnerability in the site’s management system that mimicked legitimate traffic and bypassed all but one of the county’s defenses. The hackers tried to install Trojans, a type of malicious software that is disguised as legitimate software that cyber-thieves use to gain access to users’ systems.

“We took the web server down for maintenance with the intent of closing the security vulnerability and bringing the site back up,” Henderson said.
With just one line of defense left, he said, “all that it would have taken is for a single Trojan to get past … and the server would have been compromised.”

Henderson said his staff rapidly installed the county’s new site that was in development and was supposed to be months away.
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