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June 12, 2006

3 companies vie to operate R.I. Web site

PROVIDENCE -- Two companies have submitted proposals to take over operation of the state's Web site, which was broken into by hackers, who stole credit card information, last year.

The current operator of RI.gov also submitted a proposal by today's 2 p.m. deadline to continue running the site.

State purchasing officials took the proposals under advisement to evaluate them before selecting an operator for the Web site. It is not a competitive bidding process, where the contract would go to the lowest bidder. The state does not pay the Web site operator, which derives its income from collecting convenience fees for conducting online transactions.

No details of the proposals were made public today, other than the names of the vendors who submitted them. The two new competitors for the contract are EDS of Warwick and Scientific Applications International Corp., of San Diego, Calif. The current contractor is NIC, the parent company of New England Interactive, which handles NIC's business in the region.

In December 2005, hackers exploited an error made by New England Interactive employees and broke into RI.gov's database of credit card transactions. The hackers gained access to 4,117 complete credit card numbers.

-- Journal staff writer Paul Edward Parker

The numbers belonged to people who had made online transactions at RI.gov between Dec. 31, 2004, and March 8, 2005. Transactions after March 8 were not vulnerable because New England Interactive stopped storing complete credit card numbers.

On Dec. 29, New England Interactive discover that, between 6 a.m. and 1 p.m. the previous day, hackers had attacked the site. At that time, the company believed only eight credit card numbers had been compromised, and the breach was not made public. The scope of the attack became public in the middle of January on a Russian-language hackers' Web site. It came to the attention of state officials near the end of January.

The security breach did not seem to affect users' confidence in the site. In May of this year, about three months after the news broke, RI.gov logged 48,797 transactions. In the same month last year, it had 49,273. The same data for April showed 50,025 this year and 50,502 last year.

-- Journal staff writer Paul Edward Parker

Posted by Andrea Panciera at 5:44 PM | Permalink

June 12, 2006

3 companies vie to operate R.I. Web site

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