City website hacked
This is what the Columbia Falls City website looked like Wednesday morning. It notified people it was down for the moment and asked visitors to please call city hall if they neeeded assistance.
Someone hacked the Columbia Falls City website on Monday and the site was still down as of Wednesday morning.
City manager Susan Nicosia said the cyberattack likely happened overnight Sunday, as it was up Sunday night, but down by Monday morning.
The hacker left a message on the site “hacked by RXR hacker,” she said.
The Flathead 911 center website was also hacked, Nicosia said, but it was back up Tuesday.
The Columbia Falls website does not store any personal taxpayer information — it’s just public information, such as past meeting minutes and other information about the city.
Columbia Falls Police Chief Clint Peters said city police would not do an investigation on its own as nothing was actually stolen. It’s likely a matter for the Department of Homeland Security, he noted.
The city’s site is administered by Rescue Marketing, a Missoula firm owned by Mark Riffey, a longtime programmer who used to live in Columbia Falls.
Riffey said he should have the basics of the site up by the end of the day today (Wednesday), but it will probably take a couple of days to rebuild it entirely. He said the city’s site was a Wordpress site, a web service that has about 98 million users. This is a known group of hackers hitting WordPress sites, he said.
They attack the site through a bug they’ve found. They can’t actually tear up the site, but they can add their own content, which in this case, they added a home page with the message that it had been hacked.
Riffey said his own servers weren’t compromised in the hack. He said keeping up with hackers is like playing “whack-a-mole.”
One option the city could take would be to block countries from accessing the site that may have hackers. He said he would discuss that option with Nicosia.
This story has been updated from its original version, adding comments from Riffey.