On Thursday, around 13,000 federal employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reportedly received an offensive email after a new messaging system was easily misused. The email, with the subject line “Resign,” contained a rude message that said, “Aren’t you tired of working for a complete cunt?”
Scott Smullen, NOAA’s Deputy Director of Communications, responded to the incident in a memo to staff, saying, “I’m sorry this happened to us. I will report it.”
This incident highlights how vulnerable the new messaging system is. The system was recently set up by the Trump administration, and it seems it was put together quickly without proper security measures.
A NOAA employee told journalist Ken Klippenstein, who first reported the story, “This shows how rushed the new system was—there’s no security or screening for emails sent to this address.”
Klippenstein even tested the system himself by sending a link to his newsletter to all 13,000 NOAA employees. He later announced, “I just sent this email to all 13,000 NOAA employees. The Trump administration’s changes to the messaging system made it so anyone can send emails to the entire agency.”
This month, the Trump administration introduced a system that allows a single email address to send messages to all 2.3 million federal government employees. Some agencies have already started using it to send agency-wide emails, which some employees initially mistook for spam.
