Global Courant
A shadowy hacking group has taken responsibility for breaching the University of Connecticut’s network and sending an email to the community claiming the school’s president had died.
The bogus email, sent early Wednesday morning, went to everyone on the school’s student list, informing students of the “unfortunate death of Radenka Maric.”
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A hacking group called “SiegedSec” has claimed responsibility. The group has also claimed responsibility for hacking government websites in several states that it said on its Telegram channel were the target of actions to ban gender-affirming care.
Radenka Maric, president of the University of Connecticut, was allegedly dead in a hoax email sent en masse to the school’s students. (AP Photo/Pat Eaton-Robb)
In an online chat interview with The Hartford Courant, a person who claimed to be the leader of the group said the UConn break-in was not political. Instead, he did it “for fun”, a hacker’s sheer pleasure in showing that it could be done.
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He said the group was able to get the username and password for the UConn Daily Digest email account in publicly available data on a source code storage platform. He said the system did not have a two-factor authentication system, which allowed them to log in and send the email.
Stephanie Reitz, the school’s spokeswoman, said the school has taken corrective action to prevent a recurrence of the hack.
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“UConn’s IT department removed the messages from the inbox (Wednesday morning), determined the path used to access them and took corrective action to prevent a recurrence,” she said. “IT and UConn Police are investigating the incident.”
