The Clack County Chamber of Commerce is blaming hackers for a series of e-mails stating that claimed LGBT-owned businesses weren’t welcome, reports the AP. The strange missives went out via the Chamber’s main account Wednesday night.
“In order to ensure the integrity of our website, we ask that all members refrain from listing any businesses that reference or involve the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) community. We feel the website would be better if such immoral businesses stayed out.”
A Change.org petition quickly surfaced denouncing the Chamber, but COC director Izad Khormaee says his group never sent the messages, which he calls the work of hackers. Openly gay lawmaker Rep. Jim Moeller, who represents Vancouver, WA, says he talked with Khormaee and agrees that the emails were fraudulent.
Image via Hackers/United Artists
AxelDC
More than likely an employee sent them out possibly without authorization. and they are calling them a Hacker.
EmmaMTF
Yah, as someone who works in IT/IPsec, I’m pretty sure no one in the hacking community cares about buttfuck egypt Clack County, let alone is willing to spend the time to break into and send anti-LGBT emails from those boxes. They were hacked in the same way Facebook pages get hacked – someone fucked up and left a pass on a sticky note and someone took advantage of this, or someone’s playing a prank on a computer left up and running.
Steven
@EmmaMTF: “buttfuck egypt”.
Please.
B
No. 2 · EmmaMTF wrote, “Yah, as someone who works in IT/IPsec, I’m pretty sure no one in the hacking community cares about buttfuck egypt Clack County, let alone is willing to spend the time to break into and send anti-LGBT emails from those boxes.”
My guess – it probably was hacked in some way, probably by some kid in town taking advantage of very lax security to play a childish practical joke. If you check a map, Clark County is on the outskirts of Portland, with Vancouver its largest (only?) city – about 141,000 people. Given the size, I suspect that the chamber of commerce is not up to corporate standards for network security. Usually such chambers of commerce represent a number of small businesses, none of which have much expertise in computing.
The “hacking community” EmmaMTF refers to does not include children. As a bit of entomology, the popular usage of the term “hacker” was created by the U.S. press, which picked up the word without caring about its meaning. Originally, the term “hacker” referred to a compulsive programmer who could get software written and working quickly, and who was often good at coding but with a fairly weak understanding of the more theoretical aspects of the field. A number of them worked at the M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. For research, it can be more important to test new ideas quickly than to create well designed, easily maintained software that will be thrown away when you find that it wasn’t such a good idea after all. What a “hacker” would often do is to chop up existing software (hence the word ‘hack’) and use the pieces to get started on a new project. Once they found something that was a really good idea, they could go back and re-implement the software (or let someone else do that if it was being turned into a commercial product).