October 28, Washington, DC—The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) continues to be the target of a sustained malicious campaign of disinformation and lies being perpetrated through e-mail attacks. Yet again, hackers are sending fake opinionated e-mails in ADC’s name by forging the return address and sending out thousands of e-mail messages masquerading as legitimate ADC e-mail accounts. This online identity theft is also known as e-mail “spoofing.”

Since July, the pattern of these e-mail spoofing attacks is to send out messages that contain racist, anti-Semitic and otherwise hateful language in a strategic campaign to contradict the mission and function of ADC. The messages sent by the hackers also contain computer viruses which affect the recipient of the “spoofed” email message. To be clear, these fake messages are in no way reflective of ADC and its mission.

Moreover, the hackers are using computer viruses to distribute the “spoofed” messages by using a recipient’s e-mail address book. Thus, these e-mail messages are being distributed to many people who are not even part of ADC’s e-mail list. Therefore, we kindly request that you again forward this message to your e-mail lists since ADC continues to receive responses from individuals not familiar with the work or nature of ADC. ADC reports all attacks to the appropriate authorities and continues to work with them on identifying the source of these attacks.

ADC President Ziad Asali said, “I am saddened to say that the campaign of hate against ADC and other human rights advocates continues. The zeal of these hackers to try to damage the reputation of ADC can only mean that they see the true effectiveness of our organization. I feel confident that the authorities will do their utmost using the latest computer forensic technologies to identify the source and/ or sources of these continuing attacks.”