OTHELLO – Othello City Council’s Zoom live stream was hacked and taken over by pornographic, racist content on July 28th. The incident occurred early in the meeting just before Othello Police Department Chief David Rehaume introduced a new officer to the council.
The hackers took over the stream and replaced the video content with pornography and other content featuring the Confederate Battle Flag, the Southern Cross, and swastikas. The words “hacked by nuenze” appeared on the screen as well.
Several participants in the live stream were shown as having pornography displayed on their video feed as well. The users identified themselves as “Brandon Currington, Stephanie B, Joseph D, and Barry.” It is not known if these users were connected to the hack, or if they were simply viewing the meeting and had their streams taken over.
City of Othello IT Director, Abner Garza, provided Columbia Basin News with a statement: “Our goal is to have an open meeting where constituents can take advantage of modern technology like zoom to participate and comment in our Council Meetings. On Monday, that was taken advantage of with a self-proclaimed zoom hacker who interrupted our meeting with obscene images/video. We have contacted Zoom to let them know that this event occurred and they are investigating. Moving forward we are looking into the different ways to block this type of behavior. One of the ways could be moving to a more locked down approach like webinar where people have to raise their hand and be called on to speak or show content. We are still investigating which method we want to implement to protect the Council Meetings.” Garza did not state whether a criminal investigation is underway, and Chief Rehaume has not yet responded to a request for comment.
Columbia Basin News possesses, but will not publish, screenshots from the incident.
