The city of Antwerp sent more than 100,000 fraudulent emails after a mailing tool account was hacked.
Last week, the email address support@antwerpen.be sent about 150,000 fraudulent emails within one hour. In the e-mail, the recipient read that his MetaMask wallet, a crypto wallet, had been blocked.
This message was supposed to prompt people to click on a link in the email and then log in with their login credentials. The email address and password entered then came into the hands of criminals, who thus gained free access to the money in the wallet.
Broken into mailing tool
The hackers gained access to an application in which mailing campaigns of the city are conducted. In it, they created a new e-mail address to send the messages. “The emails were sent out from a file of the aggressor, so not from our mailing file,” says Antwerp Alderman for Marketing and Digitalization Ellen Caluwaerts.
“The hackers could not get into the Campaign Monitor’s full environment, but only into one user’s specific sub-account,” she continues. The tool is separate from internal systems, and the city’s IT infrastructure was not affected, DataNews writes.
The account did have the ability to create new addresses from the city of Antwerp. That was because two-factor authentication was not set up for the mailing tool. That missing security measure has since been put in place.
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