On the morning of Tuesday Oct. 27 someone hacked into the GSA email account and sent a malicious email to all UNB Fredericton Graduate Students using the GSA Listserv. The email was one sentence long and was directly targeted at an individual who once held a position on the GSA Executive.
It called the person a “self-righteous little Socialist weenie.”
IT Services is investigating the incident to see if the message originated on campus or from a specific IP address. “We immediately contacted the individual to reassure him that it wasn’t any of [the Executive] and that we were looking into it,” said Graeme Hall, President of the GSA. “[The targeted individual] initially was shocked, he was upset, but by later in the day he was rolling with it, making fun of the fact that it was trivial, very childish, low collar. A lot of the other GSA members had the same consensus that it was something that was childish,” Hall added.
After speaking with the targeted individual the GSA Executive got together and wrote a formal apology emailed to all students who had received the original message.
“I think the fact that we dealt with it very professionally and quickly people knew we were taking it seriously,” Hall said.
The GSA has also changed the Listserv password.
Jason Edwards, VP Communications, explained that GSA Executives have always had an informal system for doing certain tasks, and not just the VP Communications has used the Listserv.
“We don’t really have an exact catalogue of who would have the password, but what we’re doing right now is making sure now that we’ve changed [the password], we know who has the password and access to the server,” said Edwards.
“We were able to kind of look back and see who were the suspected people who were on the Exec in previous years that would have some soft of hostility and would have also known what the passwords were,” said Hall.
The email was sent on the same day as the GSA elections. Hall and Edwards speculated that whoever sent the email may have thought the individual was running for a position and meant to discredit them. The individual targeted by the email was not running in the election.
Edwards said that most graduate students “don’t want to lend too much legitimacy to it by getting all up in arms.”
“There’s not much we can do, it’s been done, which is unfortunate,” said Hall.
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