The Paper Trail

Florida Investigates Hacked Text-Message Notification

January 21, 2009 RSS Feed Print
  • Comment (3)

"The monkey got out of the cage" was the mysterious message University of Florida students received Tuesday evening, the Alligator reports. The message came from a five-digit phone number, 65586—sent from Mobile Campus, a national system the school uses as part of its emergency notification program.

Mobile Campus called the text message "improper use," and a number of students were concerned that it was so seemingly easy to hack into the emergency notification system. Others, however, were also offended by the content of the message, suspecting it referred to President Obama and the inaugural festivities of the day.

Tags:
University of Florida,
cellphones,
colleges

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how to get of AL 11:11PM April 01, 2010

I just got a call from a 5-digit number: 91281. It seemed computer-generated.... what's this all about?

neil of OR 7:02PM March 05, 2009

1. First and foremost to jump to the conclusion that the message was about our new President... that's just stupid (and obviously disgusting).

2. Why isn't there a much bigger story going on here? What about a full investigation? Haven't we seen enough victims of school psycho-shootings to know that a system like this needs to *work* AND *be secure* for when it's actually needed?

Rafal Los of IL 1:53AM January 22, 2009

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