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It is fairly ironic when a government entity, meant to help thwart cyber attacks and hacking attempts, gets to be under the ax itself. In this case, it is the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s National Vulnerability Database website which has been offline since many days, apparently due to a malware infection.

According to different reports, NIST had to take the servers offline after it detected that some of them had been infected with a malware.

According to the response of NIST’s Gail Porter, “On Friday March 8, a NIST firewall detected suspicious activity and took steps to block unusual traffic from reaching the Internet. NIST began investigating the cause of the unusual activity and the servers were taken offline. Malware was discovered on two NIST Web servers and was then traced to a software vulnerability.”

It is certainly ironic that the very entity that is charged with managing the list of known cyber vulnerabilities, fell a victim to one such vulnerability. Porter claims that no malware has been served through the NIST’s website and that the decision to take down the website temporarily has been done to ensure that the malware doesn’t spread.

Porter further stated that NIST is currently trying to resolve the problem in its entirety and will restoring access to the web pages and the national database as soon as possible.

Source: Kim Halavakoski on Google+

Courtesy: The Register

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