CLAIMS by a town and county councillor that she managed to "hack" into and alter the Ledbury Town Council website, to highlight a potential security problem, have been questioned by the town council.

Cllr Liz Harvey made the claim at the last full town council meeting, and the town council has accepted that she would have been able to see the web-page code and edit the web page for herself, under what is called "local editing", which should not alter the web page display and information for other viewers.

Maria Bradman, the town council's deputy clerk said: "The ability to see and locally edit the code of a web-page cannot be locked down. It is a function of the user’s browser, or you can use any other software tool that can read and process web-pages with a text editor.

"This is how the standard world-wide-web works and it enables a vast array of devices to read pages and display them.This standard method is good enough for websites of GCHQ, the government, banks, IOC Hereford and I would suggest plenty good enough for Ledbury Town Council."

She added: "I would consider this local editing pointless rather than harmful or illegal providing that there is no attempt to breach security by attempting to change the original web-page on the server or mislead others with a doctored screen shot. In the case of the Ledbury Town Council website, where most pages are constructed on the fly from a database, changing the original pages would be doubly difficult."

Councillor Harvey described this information as "good news".

But she added: "However, the page content is editable and changes on the screen once edited. It then looked changed on the web page when the editor environment was closed down. I was concerned by this ability to make a change.

"I only looked at the change made from my own computer so I can't say whether or not the change I briefly made was visible on another machine, because I changed it straight back again."

Concerning how the situation came about, Cllr Harvey said: "I just clicked the wrong menu option and the editing environment popped up.

"It appears that everyone is relaxed about this functionality and the ability to make these sort of edits is not going to be removed."