Hacked
USU has hackers.
Miles Johnson, USU information technology security specialist, said the USU server has been attacked by hackers from eastern Europe several times since an initial attack on Dec. 14.
Several Web pages were replaced with a “defacement message,” said Bob Bayn, vice president of IT. Bayn said the USU Web pages are on two different servers even though anyone using the page can’t tell a difference. USU is moving its pages from the old server to the new one, but when the hacker attacked, some department pages still hadn’t been moved.
“The old server was hacked and the homepages were replaced with what was probably a ‘gotcha’ message from the hacker,” Bayn said. Johnson said IT is not sure what the replacement pages said because they were in Cyrillic characters.
Johnson said over the past month the USU server has seen “a number of more than usual sophisticated attacks from a location in Eastern Europe.”
“It looks like they’re preparing for something. The defacement was a bit of an anomaly, the hackers are using more subtle stuff,” Johnson said.
At least four computers were used to launch the Dec. 14 attack, Bayn said, because the hacker wanted to avoid detection by IT. He said the pages were supposed to be moved this month, but IT is trying to get them on the new server as fast as possible because the new server doesn’t have the same security problems as the old one.
Bayn said the Dec. 14 attack only highlights that USU’s computers are
of interest to outsiders. He said he believes the Russian hacker was just causing mischief but many hackers have financial gain in mind.
However Johnson said the attacks seemed to start after an AP article came out about USU’s spending on space research, so the hackers might be after technological information rather than personal information.
Johnson said students shouldn’t worry about the attacks. “We are very careful not to put any identifiable information on servers,” he said. Adding caution, Johnson reminded students to “think long and hard before putting your credit card information in anything.”
-dilewis@cc.usu.edu