Unknownhacker breaks into News Café Jan. 14
An unknown hacker caused the temporary shutdown of the journalism department’s Web paper known as the Hard News Café, located online at www.hardnewscafe.usu.edu, on Jan. 14
Mike Sweeney, journalism professor, said the department learned about the system’s malfunctions on Monday morning and the site was down for a period of 48 hours, until it was repaired to be up and running Wednesday.
“What happened was that someone was able to exploit a security hole in the program that we were running, get our passwords and get access to the server,” Nancy Williams, journalism professor, said. “That’s what the hacking consisted of, and with that, they were able to get access to the root, get in, and do a lot of damage.”
Williams said the Hard News Café is a student-produced Web paper which has been running for two and a half years without prior problems under the operating system of Unix.
Once the journalism department became aware of the problem, Williams said she contacted Barry Kort, the main support out of Boston. He had previously copied every file from the past two and one-half years prior to the hacking incident, and placed the system running on his own server until the Utah State University system could be repaired.
Williams said she also contacted Patrick Hunter of the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, who spent all of his time wiping the machines completely clean and reloading all of the files.
“Without those two, we would just be dead in the water,” Williams said because none of the files have been lost, and the system is now up and running.
“Whoever did it screwed us up, made some students have some pain and agony, and caused us to scramble, but we were able to recover,” Williams said. “That’s the great thing.”
Bob Bayn of Academic Computing said quite a few hackers have affected USU in the past, due to the fact each operating system has different vulnerabilities.
There are many precautions to be taken to ensure a safer system, such as network manager groups which share vulnerability alerts, network-traffic-shaping filters and monitors, access limitations, encryption and non-standard passwords, Bayn said.
After the 48-hour period of system trouble due to the hacker, the security for the Hard News Café has been beefed up, Williams said. They have upgraded the server to the highest and most recent version, installed a firewall and subscribed to a security e-mail system which notifies the user if there are any possible security holes to be fixed, Williams said.
In regards to the unknown hacker, Williams does not think there will be any investigation or punishment.
“There probably won’t be any follow-up to it. It’s small potatoes,” Williams said. “If you hack into Microsoft or First Security Bank, you’re going to be prosecuted for it. But if you hack into a non-profit educational server, there just isn’t going to be a criminal investigation.”