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Friday, March 29
The Indiana Daily Student

administration

IU OEM Twitter hacked

The IU Admissions Twitter account was hacked by an unknown source Saturday.

Hundreds of spam tweets had been sent out to some of the account’s followers.

The Office of Enrollment Management did not disclose the content of the tweets.

Jackie Fernette, the director of communications for the Office of Enrollment Management, said it is unlikely that it was a student pulling a prank.

She said it was probably a phishing operation of some kind.

Immediate action was taken when the problem was discovered.

IU social media strategist Tom Atkinson directed the Office of Enrollment Management staff on how to deal with the incident.

Within a couple hours, the tweets were deleted. Account administrators also made sure the account password was changed, Atkinson said. Also, access to third-party apps was revoked, Fernette said.

At 8:57 p.m. Saturday, IUB Admissions tweeted an apology for any disturbance caused.

“We sincerely apologize to anyone who may have received a spam tweet in the last hour,” it said.

One minute later, the account tweeted again to assure followers measures were taken to clean up the mess, and that the account’s privacy settings were reset.

“We have remedied the issue and expect no further disturbances for any of our followers. Thank you for your understanding.”

Monday afternoon, the Office of Enrollment Management met to attempt some additional diagnostics to determine the cause of the hack.

Fernette said there is no new information to report at this time.

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