Oregon state workers’ email accounts blocked after attack

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) – Oregon state employees found themselves unable to send work emails to some outside accounts beginning last week.

OregonLive/The Oregonian reported Monday that state employees were unable to send emails to many people they would otherwise correspond with due to a spam email attack.

The state’s chief information officer says an outside party launched an email spam campaign from a state employee account and caused several email providers to blacklist all email addresses containing the extensions oregon.gov and state.or.us.

Officials say providers that blacklisted state emails include Outlook, MSN and Hotmail.

State officials say the oregon.gov email extension was also blacklisted by email providers in June after an employee clicked on a phishing email and a malicious party was able to send more than 8 million spam emails from the account.