MN Gun Control Activists Hack Gun-Rights Email

[Bartholomew Roberts]

Apparently someone sympathetic to gun control hacked the email of gun-rights activist Joel Rosenberg and used his email address to send a hateful and threatening letter to all of MN legislators in an attempt to generate a backlash against the bill.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/joelrosenberg/#item120059
http://wcco.com/localnews/local_story_137173456.html

Despite the attempt, the bill still passed but just a heads up to everyone else to be aware that are a few new political dirty tricks in the age of the Internet.

 

[Arc-Lite]

for them to place their energy into such a counter productive direction....speaks for itself....if in fact some "gun control" hacker did it... but in todays world...it could have also been a pro rights hacker, hoping the chips would fall where they did..... things are usually a bit more complex then they appear.

 

[Standing Wolf]

...it could have also been a pro rights hacker, hoping the chips would fall where they did.....

It could have been the tooth faerie, too, but if I were a wagering man, I'd bet on a leftist extremist anti-Second Amendment bigot with a deficiency of grey matter—or do I repeat myself?

 

[Phantom Warrior]

Actually, nothing was hacked...

Sometime around 4 this morning, somebody -- we don't know who, at the
moment -- apparently used the open-to-the-public CCRN web mailer to send an
email to at least many of the members of the Minnesota House.

That would be okay; that's what it's there for.

But they sent it using my name. That isn't okay.

He's refering to the web mailer here on CCRN's website. I've used it a couple of times while the MPPA was being debated. All the bad guy had to do was type in Joel Rosenburg's name.

It's the equivalent of sending a letter and signing someone else's name (not forging it). Nothing was hacked, nothing was forged. All they did was enter his name instead of theirs. It was still a cheap and dirty trick. Fortunately, it didn't work and the bill passed.

 

[Lobotomy Boy]

Nothing was hacked, nothing was forged. All they did was enter his name instead of theirs.

The guilty party seems to have done a bit more than this. Apparently the person made threats against Dems and their families. The person is likely looking at terroristic threat charges and is in deep, deep trouble.

 

[Arc-Lite]

standing wolf..."tooth faerie" or who ever, point is...it turned out right, and second point....not everything is..as it seams.

 

[jefnvk]

You know how easy it is to spoof the 'From' address in an email?

 

[Phantom Warrior]

The guilty party seems to have done a bit more than this. Apparently the person made threats against Dems and their families. The person is likely looking at terroristic threat charges and is in deep, deep trouble.

Admittedly so. My point however, was that there was no hacking involved, only a fake name put on the web e-mail form.

You know how easy it is to spoof the 'From' address in an email?

I don't, actually. I'd be curious. But the bad guy didn't even do that. All he did was enter "Joel Rosenburg" in the From box of the form. Then the Perl script that handles the mailing sent out an e-mail to every House member in his name. But it just took the name he gave it, he didn't have to spoof anything.

 

[El Tejon]

Hope Joel makes a police report--fraud, forgery, conversion, etc.

 

[jefnvk]

I don't, actually. I'd be curious.

Where I worked, I had to build a program that sent out automatic emails. The from address had to be the person that started the request in the system, not the person currently logged on. When creating the automated e-mails in ASP, you can fill in all the fields of the email, including the from address, since the message is being sent from a server and not an actual e-mail account.

There are also a few web sites out there that do this, letting you fill in the from and to and message and subject lines, so you don't have to do the programming. A kid at school did that, using the Vice Principal's name, telling kids that they were in trouble and needed to see him. Only problem was, some of the kids went to see the VP and the one doing it got nailed.