The error on New Zealand Post's website yesterday was not a hack, but a failure of the site's internal user acceptance test (UAT), says Post.
The glitch saw queries to the search facilty on Post's website bring up a page dedicated to the rapper Eminem for a while yesterday.
Post's chief technology officer Kerry Dukie says the SOE uses the Wellington-based developer Hyperactive for web development.
"When we receive content from Hyperactive it is placed on internal UAT machines for sign off by the various business groups. When the content is signed off as production ready it is migrated to the Internet facing live servers," says Dukie.
"Yesterday morning we made a promotion of new content to the live servers after it was signed off as production ready. There was however one error not found during UAT. That was a reference to a Hyperactive internal development server eminem:9999. This resulted in the observed situation where by all search attempts were directed to eminem on port 9999.
"On Hyperactive's internal development network this resolves to eminem.hyperactive.co.nz:9999 which is the location of the Alkaline search engine they use to simulate our web environment for testing purposes. However when Internet facing this resolves to http.eminem.farmclub.com which appears to be the official site of a music group.
"This error was quickly fixed when reported to us by Mr Peter Idoine of RHE & Associates."