City of New Bedford Email Account Compromised in Phishing Attack
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The City of New Bedford, a municipality in Massachusetts, confirmed a cybersecurity incident on March 12, 2024, caused by the compromise of a high-level official email account.
An employee interacted with a phishing email designed to look like a message from a local nonprofit organization. After compromising the employee's email account, the attacker launched a secondary phishing campaign distributing malicious "proposal" links to their entire contact list.
The compromised data may include:
- Email contact list names and addresses
- Sent and received email communications
- Internal municipal metadata used in spam lures
The number of affected individuals is not disclosed. The incident did not impact core infrastructure. The full scope of the incident is currently being investigated.
The IT department disabled the affected account, revoked all active sessions and performed password resets and sign-in blocks to prevent further exploitation.
A warning was issued to all recipients of the phishing emails, advising them to delete the messages without clicking any links.
