Stoughton Public Schools students received racist mass text messages traced to a VPN in Poland. Cybersecurity expert Robert Siciliano suggests the sender may have accessed a compromised database. Police and the state attorney general are investigating.
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As for Stoughton Public Schools, when they found out about it, they say they called the police and now they're offering counseling. 6 Stoughton High School students among those who received the racist text messages reading in part, you have been selected to pick cotton at the nearest plantation. Our executive slave catchers pick you up in a brown van. The text shocking students.
The way that it was just sent out to people, it just really messed up. The struggles that— you know, we usually go through. And just to know that people are still acting this way, I feel like, you know, makes situations worse.
The superintendent says a parent called the principal after their child received the text after midnight.
Their child had received this message that's, as you know, going nationally over the last 24 to 48 hours. And so we found that we had other students that were receiving this message as well.
The school's called police, who say the Stoughton Police Department takes this abhorrent racist behavior extremely seriously and were committed to conducting a thorough investigation. Investigation to try to determine the source of these messages. The Attorney General also investigating, and we're still figuring out how they were targeted, who sent them, and how they got their cell phones. For example, cybersecurity expert Robert Siciliano says the culprit is likely trying to unsettle people.
It is likely that somewhere someone is essentially just pulling a prank, that a database somewhere was compromised and the domestic identifiers such as race, sexuality were part of that, uh, database's data sets.
So tonight, Louisiana's Attorney General has tweeted that her office has in fact located, traced some of these messages back to a VPN in Poland, but they say the original source is still unclear. So these messages really could have come from anywhere. They're also investigating. And the local Attorney General's Office, Massachusetts Attorney General, urging people to call her office if they did in fact get one of these messages. We're live in Stoughton. Sharon, it's Katie WCVB News Center for
