Manchester NH Mayor’s E-mail Hacked
November 29, 2009The mayor of Manchester (New Hampshire) had lots to be thankful for this Thanksgiving, I’m sure. Not one of those things? Getting his work e-mail account taken over by spammy cyberhackers. Mayor Frank Guinta was alerted to the hack by the city’s IT Director yesterday. Approximately 650,000 people received the spam message. The data security implications are tremendous in this particular case.
- It’s not a spoofed address; it’s the real deal (a *.gov e-mail address)
- It’s the real deal and from “an important person” (what are the chances you won’t click on the e-mail?)
If the hackers had included a link to a legitimate-sounding site (say, NewHampshireTaxRefunds.org, letters capitalized for better recognition) controlled by the hackers, and they had some kind of malware waiting to be installed on a visitor’s computer…
Hm…upon further reading of the article, it looks like not everyone is assuming this to be a hack:
Let me guess, those 650,000 messages sent from the Mayor’s city email were soliciting contributions to his run for the House of Representatives. Then somebody realized that would be illegal so all of a sudden a “hacker” did it. I’ll bet that hacker is also good at tying up Democratic party phone lines…
- LJC, Manchester [my emphasis]
I guess that’s one way of interpreting “spam” (a cynical, and most probably wrong, way).
