Community Corner

HoCo Well and Wise Hacked

The affects of the hack could be felt through multiple Howard County blogs.

 

HoCo Well and Wise reported they were hacked recently, which caused Google to alert readers that the site may contain malware Thursday morning, the affects of which spread to other Howard County blogs.

A user attempting to access HoCo Well and Wise was met with a warning saying the site contains malware and "your computer might catch a virus if you visit this site."

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Sharon Sopp, a spokesperson for Howard County General Hospital, which runs the blog in conjunction with Johns Hopkins Medicine and the Howard County Library, said the cause of the problem was bad code in the blog, which was removed on Thursday.

Jill Smith, the web and multimedia manager for HCGH, wrote in an email that although the problem has been fixed it may take up to 24 hours for Google to unflag the site.

Find out what's happening in Columbiawith free, real-time updates from Patch.

On Thursday morning, other local blogs that featured a feed showing HoCo Well and Wise's latest posts also displayed a Google warning of potential malware on the site. For example, HoCo Connect featured a Google warning about potential malware on Thursday morning due to its Well and Wise feed. And Dennis Lane, who writes the Tale of Two Cities blog, wrote that he had to disable the Well and Wise feed in order to stop the warning from appearing to visitors of his site.

We at Patch, who have featured Well and Wise posts on the site in the past, are happy to hear HCGH technical staff has dealt with the problem and will continue to distribute high quality health information to the community through their blog. We hope this doesn't deter citizens from reading it in the future.


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