The Cook County Recorder of Deeds website was hacked yesterday morning, rendering the site unusable for several hours and bringing the work of local title businesses to a halt.

When visitors attempted to access the site's address on Tuesday morning, instead of seeing the normal Recorder of Deeds site, they were surprised by a barrage of spam advertising and, in some cases, reported being rerouted to porn sites.  Some visitors saw a phony ad that purported to give them a chance to win an iPad for being a "Lucky Illinois Visitor" to the site.

One user reported that the hacked site was capable of infecting a browsing visitor with a virus, but that has not been confirmed.

Some local title businesses thought at first that their own systems might have been compromised, but it quickly became apparent to them that the problem was on the Recorder of Deeds site, not their own systems.

A county worker confirmed to the Chicago Tribune that they had been hacked, but said that no records had been compromised.  The spokesman for the Recorder of Deeds described the incident only as a "technical malfunction."

As of this morning, the site appears to be working normally.  No notice appears on the site indicating the nature of the hacking attack. 

Hacking attacks on websites are not uncommon, as sites with technical vulnerabilities can often be exploited via hacking scripts or cookbooks that require little technical expertise on the part of the hacker.  Municipal websites are frequent victims of these attacks.  Since March alone, municipal websites for Ventura County, California and the city of Winchester, Virginia have been compromised by hackers.