NEWS

City says it wasn't hacked by group

Kevin Grasha
kgrasha@enquirer.com
The exterior of Cincinnati City Hall

City officials Wednesday rejected an alleged computer hacker group's claim that they had obtained email passwords for more than 280 City of Cincinnati email accounts, including Mayor John Cranley's.

In a memo to Cranley and city council members, City Manager Harry Black said information technology officials are continuing to monitor and guard against hack attempts involving the city. The National Center for Internet Security has been notified, Black said.

"Enterprise Technology Services does not believe any city systems were breached or that this recently released information originated from city systems," he said in the memo.

The information posted, Black said, "was possibly obtained during a hack" of a social media site a few years ago. That social media site is believed to be LinkedIn.

The professional networking site was hacked in 2012, and the company said on its blog that email and password combinations of more than 100 million users had been sold on the black market as recently as May of this year.

MoonKlan, an alleged computer hacker group that claimed responsibility for several recent bomb threats, announced on Twitter Wednesday morning that they had posted the information.

The email addresses and passwords, Black said, appeared to be outdated and included many accounts for people who no longer work for the city. Among the passwords was "imlinked" and "l1nkedinisgreat."

Even so, Black said all city employees were required to reset their email passwords.

A city "Information Security Breach Response Team," he said, "is coordinating risk mitigation efforts."

MoonKlan claimed responsibility for the bomb threat made Friday that led to the evacuation of the Mason High School football stadium as well as a bomb threat Saturday that shut down Cincinnati’s streetcar.

It also said it’s responsible for recent threats against Walnut Hills High School and the Cincinnati Zoo. The group said it was not involved in the threats Wednesday that led to the evacuations of 2,300 students at Amelia High School and Amelia Middle School.

Those claims could not be verified.

The FBI has been involved with local law enforcement agencies investigating the threats, spokesman Todd Lindgren said. He declined to comment further.

The group said in a message to The Enquirer that its motive is “chaos.”

“Chaos causes panic, and that's what we laugh at; scared people. Not just that but when we launch our cyber attack’s (sic) we are going to prove a point that big scale companies have bad security."

In the memo, Black said the group "and those like them are committed to causing disruption and harm and represent a threat we take seriously."

A computer expert, who didn't want his name used so he wouldn't face harassment from hackers, said the group is not legitimate.

He believed they searched a spreadsheet downloaded from "an old hack" for City of Cincinnati email addresses. It was not a real threat, he said.