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Hoax Email Tells Virginia Students To Vote Tomorrow
Hackers broke into the email account of the George Mason University provost in Virginia, early this morning and sent out the following email:
Subject: Election Day Update To the Mason Community:Please note that election day has been moved to November 5th. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.
Peter N. Stearns
Provost
According to Dan Walsh, a spokesman for the university, the hoax message went to the entire student body -- more than 30,000 students -- and about 5000 faculty and staff.
Stearns himself quickly sent out a followup message assuring recipients that it was a hoax, which was being investigated.
Walsh said the university had contacted campus police, who are working with outside law enforcement to look into the hoax.
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Josh
Zachary
Somebody's nuts are about to be in a vice!
November 4, 2008 10:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
Hey! Don't assume all hackers are male and therefore have nuts that are vice-able! There are many women capable of such perfidy. Do try and come up with gender-neutral bad-things. Remember, we are voting for change, and that includes equal credit for women felons.
Think we could revive the Equal Rights amendment in this administration?
November 4, 2008 1:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
Will this investigation be pursued with the same vigor as Sarah Palin's hacker?
November 4, 2008 11:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
This isn't a "hoax". It's election tampering. Nasty criminal consequences for those hoaxers...
Hope those young republicans have fun in jail.
November 4, 2008 11:02 AM | Reply | Permalink
No joke. Allen Raymond spent 3 months in federal prison for just jamming GOTV phone calls. Just imaging what this "hoaxster" could get for playing with voter suppression. That was way back in 2002, however.
More recent history with the US Atty scandal has shown that very few are being held accountable now.
I so hope Obama chooses Patrick Fitzgerald as his Attorney General.
November 4, 2008 12:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Funny the "prank" occurred at George Mason University. Just this morning, I posted about Peter Leitner, the founder of the National Center for Bioterrorism at George Mason U.
Leitner, along with Scott Wheeler and Joshua Ambush, suddenly registered the National Republican Trust PAC on 9/28/08. The NRT PAC is the outfit spending more than $6 million to run those Reverend Jeremiah Wright ads.
I suspect the NRT PAC's media bills for the ads might have been illegally guaranteed by someone or some entity.
According to FEC records, the NRT PAC raised $463k from approximately 385 contributors between 9/28/08 and 10/15/08 which translates to an average contribution of $1,200.
At that rate, the NRT PAC would need another 5,000 individual contributors to cover the $6 million it is spending. (Individual contributions to PACs are limited to $5k annually.)
At best, 1,200 contributors would have had to contribute $5k each between 10/15/08 and 11/03/08 to cover the $6 million spent by the NRT PAC year-to-date.
If the NRT PAC did not raise that money, television stations are extending credit to an entity in existence for one month or the debt is guaranteed by someone or some entity. That is illegal.
I'm going to keep my eye on the National Republican Trust PAC's post-election FEC filings.
BTW, Charles Koch, wealthy wingnut extremis, is a big donors to George Mason University.
November 4, 2008 11:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
I recently left a job at GMU and still get the admin emails, and before people get too worked up about this, it's worth noting that the email in question was sent about 20 minutes after this REAL email from the provost:
So I honestly don't think anybody who got the followup email could have taken it seriously, and it was clearly a childish prank rather than a serious attempt to disrupt the election.
November 4, 2008 11:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
Oops. That was the followup after the hoax email. The original email that was sent just before the hoax was:
Happy Election Day!
November 4, 2008 11:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
This is not "just a prank", it is tampering with a Federal election. Nasty legal consequences for this. While GMU is not the usual hotbed of liberal activism one usually finds at university, it is still full of young, newly minted, naive voters who probably will vote Obama. This is very much an attempt to disrupt this election.
The Merry Young Republican Pranksters responsible for this should be readily identifiable with a little email server forensics. They will be caught. They will be prosecuted. They will be sentenced to some amount of jail time. I hope that young meat likes being someone's bitch for a while.
November 4, 2008 1:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm a GMU student and got this e-mail. One of the disturbing things about it was when I checked the headers:
Received: from m154.prod.democracyinaction.org ([8.15.20.154]) by ironport2.gmu.edu with ESMTP; Tue, 04 Nov 2008 01:16:42 -0500
Received: from [10.15.20.114] ([10.15.20.114:39637] helo=web4.mcl.wiredforchange.com) by mailer.mcl.wiredforchange.com (envelope-from ) (ecelerity 2.2.2.35 r(26825/26826)) with ESMTP id BC/ED-21096-AC8EF094; Tue, 04 Nov 2008 01:16:42 -0500
Message-id:
X_DIA_Originating_IP: : 85.195.123.24
X_DIA_Source: Host:web4.mcl.wiredforchange.com DB org
I suspect that somehow someone got into the wiredforchange servers somehow to send the mail (if I understand it correct, anyone can sign up for a site through them).
Hopefully they can figure out what happened though; my suspicion is that whoever did this hoax was not so interested in making people think the election was on the wrong day, but making it look like wiredforchange/DIA was perpetrating something.
November 4, 2008 11:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
I noticed the same thing in the email headers, and suspect the same as zadillo--someone's trying to make this look like it came from Wired for Change.
I've sent the email headers to the site admin at wiredforchange.com, though I suppose they'll be hearing about this from others.
November 4, 2008 12:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
I doubt very much that it was a hack... it was likely done through a grey-zone anonymous email site.
During the Canadian general election on October 14th everyone on the Prime Minister's distribution list, usually used for announcing events and media availabilities received a defamatory email claiming to be from the Prime Minister.
I was working as a staffer for an opposition party at the time, and received it and a similar email the next day, this time with a signature line: "Is this email real? No, it's completely fake." With a weblink to such a site, which I can't find anymore.
The matter is under investigation in Canada by Communications Security Establishment Canada, which is the most secure publicly recognized government department.
It would appear that someone just used the generic email distribution address the provost used and filtered it through one of these sites.
That's my guess at least.
November 4, 2008 12:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
I doubt very much that it was a hack... it was likely done through a grey-zone anonymous email site.
During the Canadian general election on October 14th everyone on the Prime Minister's distribution list, usually used for announcing events and media availabilities received a defamatory email claiming to be from the Prime Minister.
I was working as a staffer for an opposition party at the time, and received it and a similar email the next day, this time with a signature line: "Is this email real? No, it's completely fake." With a weblink to such a site, which I can't find anymore.
The matter is under investigation in Canada by Communications Security Establishment Canada, which is the most secure publicly recognized government department.
It would appear that someone just used the generic email distribution address the provost used and filtered it through one of these sites.
That's my guess at least.
November 4, 2008 12:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
I doubt very much that it was a hack... it was likely done through a grey-zone anonymous email site.
During the Canadian general election on October 14th everyone on the Prime Minister's distribution list, usually used for announcing events and media availabilities received a defamatory email claiming to be from the Prime Minister.
I was working as a staffer for an opposition party at the time, and received it and a similar email the next day, this time with a signature line: "Is this email real? No, it's completely fake." With a weblink to such a site, which I can't find anymore.
The matter is under investigation in Canada by Communications Security Establishment Canada, which is the most secure publicly recognized government department.
It would appear that someone just used the generic email distribution address the provost used and filtered it through one of these sites.
That's my guess at least.
November 4, 2008 12:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
The new DOJ is going to have a lot of fun chasing down all the GOP Hijinks in this cycle. They really need to make some big examples to get this type of dirty tricks to decline by 2010, and then in serious decline by 2012.
John
November 4, 2008 12:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
We can only hope these pranksters are caught.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1exiyBYnJ00
November 4, 2008 1:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
My husband said that a lot of people got this email on their blackberry at work this morning here in East Texas. Disgusting!
November 4, 2008 2:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
By the way, there are a number of hispanic workers on my husband's job.
November 4, 2008 2:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hey, if any voter is that UNINFORMED (stupid) then they don't need to be voting!@!
November 4, 2008 3:44 PM | Reply | Permalink