Published: September 06, 2008 01:00 pm      

Hackers leave message on Floyd County’s Web site

Court case search section not available

People searching for Floyd County court records online may have been surprised at what they found.

The “Case Search” link of the county’s Web site, floydcounty.in.gov, was apparently hacked. In the past, people were able to search for chronological case summaries online, but that option has since been disabled and links were removed from the main Web site.

Still, people could find some old case summaries by using search engines. A Google search showed that at least 274 Floyd County case summaries had been replaced with the message “OwnZ y0u by m0sted and Amen Turkish No War.”

Google’s caching system indicates that the messages have been there since at least Aug. 22. The caching system allows Google to capture how a Web site appears at a particular moment in time.

New Albany-based CyberTek Engineering maintains the Web site.

“The search URL (Uniform Research Locator) is brought on line sporadically as we continue to test the program as I made it available earlier in the week,” the company’s operations manager, Dan Neel, stated in an e-mail to The Tribune.

This means that a case search by name might display a hacked message, or it could show that the link to that case history is not available.

Neel said they will look into the system and the message the hackers apparently left. He added that everything on the Web site is public information, so there is no threat of private information being compromised.

After being notified of the message on Friday, Neel immediately removed the URLs.