It was recently brought to our attention by an alert reader that a headline service we had been carrying in this spot from Orbusmax.com contained links to pornography.

The code used for this headline service was from a page that had been updated by OrbusMax.com each day until around March of 2005. Our site displayed that page within a little window.

Orbusmax is a reputable news site based in the Seattle Washington area. Some time before it stopped updated the news service page, its site was hacked and pornography placed on a number of site pages.

Orbusmax found out about the hack and immediately deleted what it thought were all the offensive pages. Unfortunately, the page which was presenting news headlines on it--for other sites to pick up, had not been noticed as being a party to that hack.

Therefore, although pornography links still existed on that one news update page, the pages (the links) to the porn that the page referred to had long ago been deleted from the Orbusmax website.

Unfortunately, we at ABCGov.com have not done any updates on our site since July of 2004 and had not noticed the offense materials being displayed in this window from the OrbusMax page, until recently being apprised.

Once notified of this problem, ABCGov.com immediately removed the offensive code and notified Orbusmax of the existence of the offensive material still on the one page on its site.

Orbusmax, on hearing about it, also immediately removed the vestiges of its headline service. They explained that they had been subject to this hacker's attack, had removed what they thought were all the offensive pages, but had not known about this one page.

Regardless of the circumstances, however, both Orbusmax.com and ABCGov.com are victims of this attack, and would like to apologize to readers for this material not being found and taken care of earlier It is now corrected.