Spammers Commandeer City of Mobile’s Server via Shellshock

Mobile, Ala.’s computer system is “antiquated,” according to city spokesman George Talbot, who said hackers used it this week to blast emails.

The server was installed in 1994.

“The City of Mobile’s external email server stopped working Tuesday afternoon,” Fox10 News reports. “Email sent and received from outside the city’s system is temporarily blocked.”

The hackers interrupted internal and external email by exploiting the newly-discovered “Shellshock” bug, a defect in a program used by millions of computers running Linux and Apple OS X.

The vulnerability lets hackers run dodgy commands at the computer-server level.

Ukraine and China are thought to be the sources of the malicious activity, which had gone on for a couple of weeks before successfully breaching the server. 

Talbot said citizen’s personal and business information was never at risk.