The hacking of a Morgan County government website during the weekend was more vandalism than a malicious attack, the website developer said.

Rudy Kaldi, owner of Web developer IMS Enterprises, said the Morgan County License Commissioner's Office website was replaced by an image by AnonGhost, a "hacktivist" group that has attacked hundreds of government websites around the world in the past few months.

"This was probably a bot that someone unleashed just to see where they would land," Kaldi said. "There probably wasn't a person on the other end of the attack. I doubt seriously anyone singled out Morgan County."

County Communications Director Sheryl Marsh said the attack didn't do any real damage because the license commissioner website does not have any personal information about taxpayers on it. The attack replaced the normal website with an image bearing AnonGhost's logo until about noon Monday.

"Still, we're taking it very seriously," Kaldi said. "We've taken measures to ensure this doesn't happen again."

Kaldi said one measure was to change the passwords for accessing the company's servers.

"This is something that is quite common in this business, unfortunately," he said.

Ben Montgomery can be reached at 256-340-2445 or ben@decaturdaily.com.