EMMAUS, Pa. — After months of dealing with hacking issues and unseemly links appearing on its website, Emmaus now is building a new municipal website — and hopes to make it even better than before.
Starting in September, borough officials found that occasionally instead of important links taking you to a council's zoom meeting or letting you to pay your bills, those links instead would take you to adult dating and gambling sites.
- Emmaus' borough website has had links on the site hacked to redirect to inappropriate websites since September
- Despite efforts to repair the site, it eventually was taken down because of the virus' impact
- A new temporary site has been launched by the borough as it works to create a new, more functional website for residents
Borough Manager Shane Pepe said the borough initially was notified in September that a breach on the website changed some links to redirect to these unwanted destinations.
Over the ensuing weeks, those working at the borough tried to scrub the links from the website. As they removed ones they found, more would come back over time, occasionally with new unwanted destinations, officials said.
"After we thought we got it fixed for like the third or fourth time, somebody would email me and say, 'Hey, I there's something wrong with your website, it's going to somewhere it's not supposed to,'" Pepe said. "It's like, alright, right, scrub it again."
"That's been our website nightmare."Borough Manager Shane Pepe
Officials believe the virus to the WordPress code came from a plugin installed, and that the virus managed to get too deep into their site to simply remove.
"They found it, then started cutting and all of a sudden content from our website starts going with it because now we're in the code," Pepe said.
WordPress is an open-source content management system and its developers say the runs more than 43% of all sites on the web as the website backend.
Eventually, two weeks ago, the site crashed entirely from the breech. The borough briefly had to rely on its Facebook page to post meeting agendas.
Pepe assured that no personal data was breeched and no online bill-paying services were affected because those services run on sites separate from the main municipal website and remain encrypted.
"We don't store anything from our website that's personal or confidential," Pepe said.
He said there even was a legal concern, too, given the requirement of municipalities to be able to post minutes and agendas on their websites under the law.
Added to that was that process to create a new website would be about six months.
"That's OK if you're a municipality of 300 people," Pepe said. "But we're not."
Before the old site went down, the borough voted to contract a new company to create a website for the borough through the company CivicPlus, which specializes in municipal websites.
The company recently designed and manages the site for Lower Macungie Township.
"I'm concerned about a kid clicking on our website going to adult content," Pepe said. "Before this all started, we were talking about redoing our website. This fast-forwarded that conversation."
In the meantime, Assistant Borough Manager Sara Jarrett-Eaton has worked with those at the borough to create a temporary site using the platform Wix, which launched Friday.
While the new temporary website does not have all of the details, documents and information of the old site, its news section will be able to post updates, and Jarrett-Eaton and Pepe said that those looking for specific information or recommendations for the website can email the borough and the borough will continue to update the temporary site as it gets feedback.
Though the new site does not yet have the correct destination URL at the top of the page when directed to it (currently, the address displays as sjarrett29.wixsite.com/borough-of-emmaus), the site still is arrived at from the borough's traditional URL.
Jarrett-Eaton and Pepe assured that this is correct for residents seeking the borough website in the meantime and they will work to correct it.
Pepe said the new website will have a unique resident notification feature for local residents, be ADA accessible and allow for easier reporting of issues to the borough.
"I think our citizenry also learned a lot from COVID," Pepe said. "The people that never thought that they could use a computer and kind of forced to or were forced to, but now they rely on it.
"They want to be able to fill out applications and forms and pay bills and they want them more interaction on a website. Our former website, even when it was working, didn't provide those."
Most content of the old website is archived on the Wayback Machine internet archive.
Those having difficulty finding information on the temporary site or who have suggestions for it are encouraged to reach out to the borough.
