Hacking draws wrong kind of attention to Edina's website

Updated: March 6, 2010 - 9:27 PM

Using the website's "Tell a Friend" page, which has an e-mail application, a hacker sent out hundreds of thousands of spam messages.

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People who like to knock Edina joke that the city's name stands for Every Day I Need Attention. The city website certainly got its share in January, when the total number of hits on the site skyrocketed.

But it turns out that someone was enamoured for all the wrong reasons. All the hits -- they peaked on Jan. 26, at an eye-popping 1,573,088, about 1,300 percent above December's busiest day -- came courtesy of a computer hacker.

Using the website's "Tell a Friend" page, which has an e-mail application, a hacker sent out hundreds of thousands of spam messages. Computer experts at LOGIS, a Golden Valley consortium that monitors, maintains and hosts government websites, noticed the abnormal activity when its e-mail system began to fill up, said Jennifer Bennerotte, Edina's communications director. The application was shut down for a couple of weeks while programming changes were made to prevent further spamming through the site.

Bennerotte said the messages were gibberish, just bunches of jumbled letters. Only the hacker knows what the goal was, which may have been just to prove it could be done.

"I guess hackers do it just for the sense of accomplishment," Bennerotte said.

MARY JANE SMETANKA