OHIO—It is somewhat appropriate that porn was placed on a site about natural resources, thought in this case it was a site operated by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, but what’s remarkable is that someone spotted it.
According to The Columbus Dispatch, a Risk Based Data Management System on the department’s website that stores “comprehensive well data for over 100,000 wells permitted since 1980” contains a file transfer protocol (or ftp) site used mainly to transfer large files such as maps.
“But no credentials were required to do so,” the paper reported today, “allowing anyone in the public to transfer whatever they wanted. Enter the two porn videos that were uploaded Feb. 21 and discovered yesterday by a Dispatch reader. A number of other music files and other non-official looking files also were there.”
Specifically, it reported, “A video file titled ‘Sexy Babe’ containing pornography appeared on the site.”
The files were removed and credential requirements installed on the system, and the matter seems to have ended there, even though it was certainly an inside job. A department spokesperson told the Dispatch that “the site was not hacked because it remained outside of the firewall with ‘no roots to the inside network.’”
“Someone was using it as cloud storage,” she said. “Unfortunately that happens.”
