“Phishing” emails might have hooked town employee in week-long email outage
The Town of Wheatfield is only just recovering from a Gmail hack that left the town’s email system down for about a week.
Councilman Larry Helwig said “it’s been a painful week” with long days getting the system back up in the information technology department.
The town has brought in outside consultants to help deal with the hacked email situation that first became apparent when phony emails were being sent out by town employees.
How the hackers got into the system is still unknown, Helwig said. But he strongly cautioned employees not to click on links contained in emails.
Emails from Amazon, UPS and other “trusted sources” should be scrutinized before assuming authenticity.
Helwig said the town has “the best of everything” in regards to information technology and said employees can be the weak link.
“A lot of people are getting hooked by this,” he said.
Email service is just being restored.
“You don’t want to turn everything back on too quickly,” Helwig said, warning of the danger of becoming re-infected by the hack.
