Newcastle council online community hijacked by hackers

As posted in the Online Community Consultation blog, Newcastle Council was recently stung by having hackers take over its online consultation community and redirect the site to an independent site containing adult content.

As discussed in the post, Red faces in Newcastle, the lesson to be learnt is to ensure effective security is in place to prevent hacking.

There's a secondary point discussed around the length of the sign-up process, which needs to be as short and as simple as possible to keep the barriers to participation low. I didn't see the Newcastle Council community site, so cannot personally comment, however from the post it appears that a more complex sign-up process had real impacts on the number of participants.