We receive emails from individuals that work for the city of Little Rock on a daily basis (most often the city attorney and the inept FOI coordinator) and yesterday was no different.
In a string of emails from the FOI coordinator that contained information about the budget that we requested months ago, records that the city was extremely reluctant to provide, we spotted a suspicious email.
We have been emailing back and forth with city officials and employees for years and have never known they to use third-party system to securely send emails or information.
In fact the city of Little Rock is light years behind in any type of technology.
So we forwarded the suspicious email to city attorney Tom Carpenter.
We must point out that Carpenter is a self-proclaimed "luddite", but you would think that if the city used such a sysytem, the city attorney would be using it to send documents to others when dealing with settlements or other secret matters they are often involved in.
As we suspected, Carpenter was not familiar with the use of the third-party system and he forwarded the suspicious email to Randy Foshee, the IT Director.
We received an email from Foshee today in which he indicated he had no knowledge of that third-party systems use.
Of course our publisher did not click on the link, he was involved in Corporate Security and taught classes on phishing attempts and data security.
Hackers use man-in-the-middle attacks and frequently piggyback phishing emails to fool unwary individuals and gain access to their computer network or individual device.
We urge the city to take precautionary measures to inform the public about this suspicious activity (as we are).