Last week, the Federal government stopped responding to DNS requests for the State of California's Web site in response to servers within that network that had been hacked and were redirecting visitors to pornographic web sites.

The trouble started in September, when the Transportation Authority of Marin asked California's Department of Technology Services to take over primary DNS for TAM's site, after its primary servers - operated by a third party - had been hacked. The GSA, which manages the top-level .gov domain, incorrectly assumed that the State of California's Web site, ca.gov, had been hacked and took steps to remove the state's domain from its root server.

The error was discovered and the state's domain was properly restored to the .gov root level server before any serious disruption of traffic took place. Had the error not been discovered or corrected, the State of California's domain, and all official business associated with it, would have been disrupted.

The GSA is reviewing the incident and announced last week that it had revised its policies to avoid actions that could result in major shutdowns. Meanwhile, on Thursday of last week, DNS servers for the Superior Court of Madera County and the Brookhaven National Laboratory sites were redirecting visitors to pornographic Web sites. The sites themselves have not been compromised.