news-record.com

No, this isn't about H1N1 - what most call swine flu - though Guilford County has made news about that recently.

Instead, this is about a warning that your Web browser may have thrown up as you attempted to access the county's Web site lately. Google, for our Web browser, sent a message that read "Reported Attack Site!" in all red and black.

Scary stuff. But the site is safe, according to the county's information systems director Barbara Weaver. She said that Mac users are seeing the warning, but not as many Internet Explorer users. We use Firefox, and it popped up for us.

In an e-mail, she told us things are safe. The message read:

"We weren’t hacked, but one of our employees who has rights to update the web site had a virus. (the technical staff assure me that the site isn’t dangerous.) We use Content Management Services (basically a way for contributors to publish their information directly to the site). When the employee updated the site with the holiday banner, the virus inserted a single line of code called an <iframe> in the entry. The malware and other malicious sources use <iframes>….We also use a number of <iframes> on the county site for legitimate purposes…an example is the page you use to view the commissioner meetings by video, a page within a page. We are still researching how the employee got the virus."

We access the site nearly every day for numerous reasons, usually contact info, agendas and video of meetings. Just seemed strange to bump against from the county.

But, heck, our nation is developing cyber defenses.