Icma2002.Com

About 35,000 students, faculty and staff at George Mason University received an email at 1:16 am Tuesday alerting them that the election had been moved to Wednesday. Normally it would be easy to dismiss such a claim as junk – except in this case the email came from George Mason’s provost.

George Mason students could be missing out on election-day lines

To dispense with the obvious: The election hasn’t been moved and it wasn’t really the provost who sent the email. Instead, someone managed to break into the provost’s account and send the message to a privately maintained address list, Dan Walsch, a university spokesman, tells the Business Technology Blog. News of the hack was earlier reported by the Washington Post.

Here’s the email:

To the Mason Community:

Please note that election day has been moved to November 5th. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.

Peter N. Stearns
Provost

Not exactly the most compelling scam. Not surprisingly, Walsch says that most of the people he’s heard from have wanted to know why the provost would send such an email, not asking whether the election really was moved.

The university is working with law enforcement to get to the bottom of the email break in, but doesn’t have any leads yet. “The people who do this sort of thing know how to cover their tracks,” Walsch tells us. “Everyone is a suspect.” Except the provost, he adds.

-Ben Worthen

Image: Reuters

Source: WSJ.com: Business Technology