SOUTH BEND — It’s happened again: some numbskull felt it was necessary to hack into a Pacific County Commissioners budget workshop. It is the second incident in less than a year and may drastically affect how the county goes about public meetings.

By the second week of September, the county usually finishes preliminary budgets and prepares for final number crunching in early to mid-October.

The commission sat down for a budget workshop on Sept. 17 and made it two hours into the meeting before it was interrupted. Someone hijacked the meeting with pornography and offensive language, including use of the ‘n-word.’

Pacific County General Administration Chief Administrative Officer Paul Plakinger told the Observer that the incident happened at 3:15 p.m., about two hours and 15 minutes into the meeting.

The hacker opened multiple windows on the screen to display pornography.

Pull Quote

‘This has now happened twice during critical

budget discussions. In order to prevent it from

happening again, the county is moving back to in-person only budget work sessions, with no Zoom option.’

Paul Plakinger, Pacific County General Administration chief administrative officer

Plakinger immediately shut down the Zoom feed, and the county opted to end the meeting to avoid potential Open Public Meeting Act issues.

“The first two hours of the workshop proceeded smoothly,” Plakinger said. “We were joined by a small handful of citizens on Zoom at approximately 3 p.m. At around 3:15 p.m., we were “Zoombombed” with pornographic imagery and racist/profane language. We immediately canceled the remaining 45 minutes of the workshop.

“This has now happened twice during critical budget discussions. In order to prevent it from happening again, the county is moving back to in-person only budget work sessions, with no Zoom option.”

Attendees, including county personnel, will now need to meet in-person in the commissioner’s conference room at the courthouse annex building in South Bend.

‘It’s disgusting’

“It’s disgusting,” Commissioner Lisa Olsen said. “It starts out innocently enough. We have to admit [on Zoom] people even if we don’t recognize [their] names, but once it starts, which is usually within a couple minutes, the only thing to do is to shut the meeting down.”

Other meetings are also in jeopardy of being moved to in-person only if the incidents continue. Plakinger and the county are tired of budget workshops being disrupted, considering the commission’s primary responsibility is budget management.

Plakinger is open to setting up a call-in service where attendees can only listen to the meeting via audio.

A similar incident to last week happened on Oct. 27, 2023, during a budget workshop between the commissioners and the Pacific County Sheriff’s Office. Witnesses recounted that someone randomly started drawing a penis on the screen and then played a video of a man pleasuring himself.

Unlike the recent incident, the workshop in 2023 was not technically hacked into because Pacific County General Administration Chief Administrative Officer Paul Plakinger did not shut down access to Zoom’s screen sharing feature.

Cyber crime

The statute for filing criminal charges for a cyber crime state that the access has to be unauthorized. The first incident did not meet the burden because screen sharing was open access. However, the incident last week is an entirely different story.

Washington state classifies cyber crime, such as hacking, as a class C felony, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. If the county information technology (IT) branch is able to successfully track down the hacker’s internet provider (IP) address, charges could be filed.

Zoom has had its fair share of incidents over recent years during the service’s rise to relevance during the covid-19 pandemic. Despite its vulnerabilities, the service has been a convenient option for holding meetings and has led to greater public awareness and involvement in county matters.

In November 2023, Zoom announced it had detected a software vulnerability that hackers found, allowing them to take over host accounts. Hackers could then hijack meetings and steal information. The vulnerability has since been fixed, according to Zoom.

The term “Zoombombing” has also gained steam with Zoom’s rise and describes when someone takes over and disrupts a meeting. The usual culprits are trolls who get their joy from being a pesky annoyance.