Benton County's website is on the road to recovery, according to Brian Rhodes, the county's chief information officer.

The website, which is hosted off-site, was hacked into over the weekend, redirecting people to a malicious and potentially harmful site. Google scans flagged the problem and applied a warning to those trying to contact the county.

"Basically we were vandalized, but we're getting it fixed," Rhodes said.

The files were accessed late Friday afternoon and the county's technical support workers began tackling the problem Monday morning. Rhodes said the code has been cleared and he expected the site would be up and running again by the end of the day.

Some people using Internet Explorer were able to get site information late Monday. Other browsers were still getting an alert message.

He said that warnings were still appearing from Google on Tuesday morning and he didn't know when those may be removed, although he was hoping they would be cleared by the end of the day.

"We will alert the search engines when the site is up and secure but we don't know for sure when the warnings will be removed," Rhodes said.

He said that the county would like to find out who hacked the system but he isn't optimistic that the vandals will be found.

"Tracking something like that down is pretty hard to do," he said. "Right now we are concerned with getting everything running normally."