The email account of Blackshear Fire Chief Bucky Goble was recently hacked and used to send out a wave of emails with a suspicious link to a drop box account.
Goble and Blackshear Police Chief Chris Wright moved quickly to notify recipients of the hacked email and to re-secure Goble’s account. Goble said he came in right away and changed his account password as soon as he was notified by phone about the unauthorized messages tied to his email account.
“It never got past our firewall,” said Wright.
The July 16 email was times tamped 5:20 p.m. and had the miss pelled subject line “Black Shear Police”. It originated from Goble’s official account which ends with a blackshearga. org extension.
The hacker made sure their work was hidden from Goble by adding a pre-set rule to Goble’s inbox to delete any responses to the fraudulent email, preventing him from being notified by email that his account had been compromised. The secretly added rule to delete responses to the malicious emails was hidden under a single letter name ‘M’.
Anyone that received the email and clicked the link it contained is advised to change their current password and check to verify no changes to their own inboxes or mail handling presets have been made.
Goble is unsure how the recipients for the mass email were selected. It is possible they came from email addresses in his sent folder. The fire chief thinks his own email was compromised from another source. “I got it from Georgia Forestry.” Goble also said, “I don’t think it is an actual virus. I think this was a phishing scam.”
