Hey! I'm Tim Hordern, the owner of the hashtagtesting Slack group. As I mentioned in the Slack chat, it seems like this was the work of a someone scraping an email list from a different Slack and then spamming our registration server to send you invites.
I've copied in the note I've pinned to my Slack below which hopefully provides a bit of context, and a link for how to deactivate your account if you don't want to be part of the Slack anymore.
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Quick update: It appears the mass invite was the work of a malicious individual who copied a lot of emails from another Slack and utilised my registration server to spam invites out. Myself and a number of other Slack channel administrators are trying to coordinate our information and are working with the Slack Support team to identify the person/peoples responsible and see what action can be taken.
To be clear: Under no circumstance was your email or PII scraped or leaked by myself or my server in any way. The only information retained in this Slack is the information you choose to make public in chats or in the team directory, and your registration information as stored by Slack itself for your login. I'm really sorry if you received a spurious invite to this Slack, even if it does fit the theme of testing.
I can only hypothesize as to why someone would do this - potentially aiming to overwhelm our Slackin registration servers, or DDoS the Slack invite API (Slack was rate limiting requests this morning, could be a coincidence).
Brendan would have had to jump through the hoops to work with 18F, including the SAM validation. Unless you are talking about working directly for 18F as a federal employee, which would have different levels of requirements.
I've copied in the note I've pinned to my Slack below which hopefully provides a bit of context, and a link for how to deactivate your account if you don't want to be part of the Slack anymore.
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Quick update: It appears the mass invite was the work of a malicious individual who copied a lot of emails from another Slack and utilised my registration server to spam invites out. Myself and a number of other Slack channel administrators are trying to coordinate our information and are working with the Slack Support team to identify the person/peoples responsible and see what action can be taken.
To be clear: Under no circumstance was your email or PII scraped or leaked by myself or my server in any way. The only information retained in this Slack is the information you choose to make public in chats or in the team directory, and your registration information as stored by Slack itself for your login. I'm really sorry if you received a spurious invite to this Slack, even if it does fit the theme of testing.
If you'd like to stick around, you are more than welcome to! If you just want out then you can follow these directions to Deactivate your account in Settings: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/203953146-Deactivat...
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I can only hypothesize as to why someone would do this - potentially aiming to overwhelm our Slackin registration servers, or DDoS the Slack invite API (Slack was rate limiting requests this morning, could be a coincidence).