York Co. Solicitor's Office website hacked

It appears two government-related websites were hacked early Monday in York County.

Someone called the 16th Circuit Solicitor's Office to report they had tried to log on to the agency's website and discovered a message from a hacker.

The computer screen shows a picture of the nation of Iran and a message that the site was "Hacked by Ashiyane digital security team."

Solicitor Kevin Brackett said his office website contains no sensitive or personal information. It's merely public documents about the court system, schedules and press releases.

"We have nothing on there," Brackett said.

He does not think this was a case of hackers looking to steal anything of value.

"They just go and look for targets and try to exploit the weaknesses of the system so they can spray paint their name on the wall and say, 'Hey, look how smart we are,'" he said.

Mark Farris with York County Economic Development said his office had the same odd message on its internet website. Farris said he knows of nothing of value to hackers on their site, either.

However, the point may not be to steal, but to frighten.


Chris Swecker is a former assistant director of the FBI office in Charlotte. Now, he does consulting for computer security to help prevent fraud.

"This looks to me more like vandalism. Somebody trying to make a point," Swecker said.

After the massive security breach at the state's Department of Revenue office last fall, there is a lot of nervousness about the safety of sensitive and vital personal information.

That breach allowed hackers to steal millions of Social Security numbers and financial information from South Carolina taxpayers.

All it took was one Department of Revenue employee to accidentally open a malicious email, which revealed passwords to hackers.

That incident gained national attention, and that could be drawing hackers to the state's local and state government websites.

Swecker said state could have a cyberimage problem.

"If you want to make a name for yourself, you can just go target one of the government entities in South Carolina, and then you brag about it," he said.

Both local agencies that appeared to have been hacked on Monday took their websites down to find and fix the problem. Then, they expected to relaunch them by days' end with new, upgraded security features.

Both the solicitor's website and the site for Economic Development were run off of older servers that are separate from the York County's main servers. That may have allowed them to be easier targets because of the older technology.

Since there was no threat of losing sensitive information, Brackett said a police investigation is not likely. Especially if the hacker is in the Middle East, like the page seems to indicate.

"We googled these people and found evidence that they've not only done this here, but around the world. If that's the case, I'm not going to have a bunch of people trying to track down somebody in Iran. Even if we know who it was, you can't extradite them. So what's the point?" Brackett said.

WSOC