December 2022 Edition | Volume 76, Issue 12
Published since 1946
WMI Loses Email Service for Five Days
On December 2, 2022, the Wildlife Management Institute (WMI) suffered a loss of email services due to a security breach of its email server provider, Rackspace. The computing cloud giant based in San Antonio became aware of a security breach on the morning of December 2nd and immediately isolated their Microsoft Exchange service where the breach was believed to occur. When an Exchange Server is taken down due to a failure or ransomware attack, users can neither send/receive emails nor can they access their mailboxes. On December 6th, Rackspace confirmed that the security breach of their hosted Microsoft Exchange service was the result of being hit by a ransomware attack that left many of its customers without access to email.
When Rackspace initially became aware of the suspicious activity on December 2nd, they began taking proactive measures to isolate the Hosted Exchange environment to contain the incident. They have since hired a cyber defense firm to determine the extent that any data might have been affected. The company added that if it determines that sensitive information was affected, it will “notify customers as appropriate.”
The issues affecting Rackspace’s hosted Microsoft Exchange service remains ongoing at the time of writing. The company is currently moving its Hosted Exchange customers over to Microsoft 365 to limit disruption. DJ Case, who handles WMI information technology services, transitioned the organization from the Microsoft Exchange service to Microsoft 365 on December 7th. WMI staff worked with DJ Case to reestablish email connections to our staff, and that process was completed over the course of last weekend.
For our partners and colleagues in the conservation community that have reached out to us over the past seven days, we apologize for any delayed or missed response. This incident did not have an impact on WMI’s program delivery, nor did it affect our financial system. Working with DJ Case, we have gained access to and began reviewing the archive email folders during that time; however, we could have missed something. If you were expecting an email response from one or more of our staff, please reach out to us again. On our end, we will continue to bring our system back online and will be following up on missed email correspondence as they are identified. We also sincerely appreciate the tireless efforts of the DJ Case staff Jon Marshall, Rick Clawson, and others for helping to resolve this unfortunate situation. We thank you for your patience, and we are sorry for the inconvenience while we get our email system back online.