A mayor’s email account has been hacked: 11,000 messages sent

Mayor Urs Affolter’s work email address was the victim of a hacker attack on Tuesday morning. The municipality has now clarified this and published a ‘final report’: ‘Advanced analyzes show no evidence that internal data has been made accessible to third parties,’ the municipality said.

The in-depth analysis found that as part of the attack on Mayor Urs Affolter’s work email address, thousands of emails were unintentionally sent in his name. A large number of these emails had the English subject line “is this your valid email?” “Based on this topic, it can be assumed that the unwanted message was forwarded directly to the spam folder in the recipients’ mailboxes,” the municipality said.

All emails with this subject were sent to recipients with email addresses from providers such as @outlook.com, @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, and @me.com. “These are only email addresses that were not on the mayor’s address list.”

The analysis also found that approximately 11,000 messages with the subject “Voicemail (00 minutes 53 sec),” or “Voice message 00 minutes 53 seconds,” were unintentionally sent from the mayor’s address. “Of these messages, 118 emails were sent to internal contact addresses from the address list and therefore 12 to external third parties,” the municipality said.

In addition, the analyzes conducted revealed no indications that sensitive data has been forwarded or sent to third parties. Furthermore, there is no evidence that data flowed from Urs Affolter’s email account in any other form. Why such an incident could have happened is the subject of further investigation.

There is currently no known widespread financial damage. The mayor’s email account was reactivated and checked. Due to the bad reputation of @buchs-aargau.ch, some third-party providers no longer allowed sending or receiving emails from the community address. This led to limited digital availability of the administration.

Due to the severity of the intervention in the IT structure of the municipality of Buchs and after careful examination of the available analyses, the Aargau cantonal police were immediately called in after the analysis results became available. The cantonal police are responsible for determining who is behind the attack.

In addition, the external IT service provider that supports the municipality of Buchs continues to provide support. In addition to the various immediate measures, he also carried out a complete analysis of the events. The incident has been closed internally. Further steps are the responsibility of the criminal justice authorities. The incident was also reported to the Federal Cybersecurity Office.

“The municipal council strongly condemns the incident and regrets the circumstances it has caused to third parties,” the statement concludes. (aargauerzeitung.ch/nro/lyn)