KNOXVILLE (WVLT) – A Knox County School Board member learned on Wednesday that someone had hacked into her personal email account and sent out hundreds of emails claiming to be her.
Cindy Buttry first got word that her Hotmail account had been accessed by someone else when her cell phone and home phone started ringing over and over again. Each caller was a concerned friend, relative or acquaintance who wanted to know if she was alright. Apparently the hacker sent out messages saying the elected board member needed help from abroad.
“Every commissioner that I have saved, every school board member, PTA mom, or even just constituents in general got this email," Buttry said. “It basically says that I'm in London on a conference, lost my wallet in a taxi cab and need money to get back home," said Buttry.
The email requested financial aid to be wired to an account in Euros the currency of the European Union.
“I feel for anybody in my situation, because you don't know who to call and you don't know what to do next,” Buttry said, still having no clue who could have hacked into her account. “In some ways I wish I was Sarah Palin, that way I would have the FBI and Secret Service swooping in to help with this. They would say, ‘ok here's what you need to do’ and, ’we'll take care of it mame, don't worry about it.’"
Her email may have been targeted because it is posted on the school system’s website, but the hacker could really be anyone, and she doesn’t know for sure what personal information they might have accessed.
Hotmail has locked her account and she is now working on setting up a secure email through the school system for her work as a school board member. She also plans to set up a private personal email account that can’t be so easily hacked.
Experts say free email accounts like Hotmail and Yahoo! can be easily accessed by others if they know enough about you to guess your password or secret security questions. They say if you have one, make your password as secure as possible by choosing a random sequence of numbers, letters and symbols.
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