An Edmonton blogger gained access to the
Alberta government's 2010 budget website the night before the budget was
revealed.
Mack Male could have made a fortune if he knew how to
play the markets with that information, unfortunately he didn't. Apparently he visited
http://budget2010.alberta.ca as a
logical guess for the location of this year's site, given that
http://budget2009.alberta.ca was last
year's address.
A log-in screen prompted Male for a username and
password, so he entered "administrator" and "password"--
common default log-in information. While Male didn't find any budget documents on the
website, but he was able to navigate pages that showed information
placeholders. Apparently when he tried again next day someone had
changed the password. Alberta Finance spokesman Bart Johnson said.An
information technology team is looking into what happened. But nothing in the budget was compromised,
Johnson added.
Alberta's auditor general Fred Dunn. Dunn slammed the level of
security on Alberta's government
computer networks in an October 2008 report. This time he is a bit more
muted. He said that a more secure password would be expected for
information that should be protected, there is little reason to be
concerned
about someone gaining access to an empty website.