City councilors learn more on 'hacking' scare

TULSA - The city of Tulsa is giving new insight into an admitted slow response on a false hacking of its website.

In a city council meeting on Thursday, councilors said they didn’t get all of the answers they wanted.

It all started when the city thought their website had been hacked and sent out 90,000 letters to citizens saying their information may have been compromised. It turns out a security company was performing a standard scan.

The city said five people received emails immediately after the scan. Plus, the security company, SecurityMetrics, said the scan was planned.

“One of the things is the way the company changed their scanning technique.  It looked totally different from what they were used to, in the past when the company does their scans,” Interim IT director Jonathan Brooks said.

That’s not what SecurityMetrics is telling the 2NEWS Investigators. They sent us a statement saying “Our processes do not change from customer to customer.  We conduct the same scan processes for hundreds of thousands of customers every year.”

The city said it is still looking into exactly what happened and is currently conducting an internal review. It is also planning to change its future process.