Elkhart deputy city attorney hacked

 

ELKHART, Ind -- Michiana officials have recently been targets for emails hacks, as Elkhart Deputy City attorney, Randy Arndt, falls victim in the latest hack.

The hack took place on Thursday evening, evening, we thousands of emails went out from a hacker, pretending to look for applicants for a law firm, then eventually asking for money from anyone who followed the instructions.

The Elkhart city Information Technology department, is labeling it a brute force attack, where the hacker gathers a large number of passwords and attempts all of them until successfully logging in.

"We had a breach in someone’s email account. It was appeared to be a brute force attack. They got into the account, sent out an error email, and we isolated it and resolved the issue," said Elkhart city I.T. Director Richard Warfield.

The attempt is not uncommon but fortunately for anyone who came across this suspicious email, nobody was negatively impacted by the brute force attack.

"It posed no danger to anyone as we have mechanisms in place to isolate certain things if we get let’s say a ransom ware attack, we have things in place to catch that and stop it in its tracks," said Warfield.

The city I.T. department does have several ways to create a password to decrease these incidents moving forward: 

• Create a phrase for a password 
• Change your password every 30-90 days
• Do not write down your password on paper
• Do not share your password electronically
• Use special characters