Is your school network safe??

In a world where we have to deal with the fear of campus shootings and crime, it only seems natural that the next step would take place over the internet. Now don't get me wrong I don't support any of these kinds of acts where a student's safety is compromised, especially being a student myself I feel this story can hit home just because of its nature. Being an I.T. major I can really feel sorry for the network administrator at the University of Harvard. Here is a guy whose entire career is based upon protecting, running and maintaining this network and here comes some random hacker to break it, copy an entire database worth of material and display it for the world to see. One could say this network admin. is going to be busy for quite a few days fixing security loop holes.

In this article we see that a hacker on this past Monday from the date of this article has allegedly broken it one of the University of Harvard's websites and compressed it into a 125mb file that appeared on BitTorrent a peer to peer file sharing application. It was hosted on the "Pirates Bay" a BitTorrent website. The database appears to be legit comprising of misc. files taken from Harvards servers. An attached note from the supposed hacker states that this stunt was used to demonstrate the weakness in security at Harvard. A very serious stunt indeed, one can only wonder how weak it truly was for someone to break into a school network without anyone catching it and stealing data of of their databases and then distributing it out onto the internet.

This kind of situation could in theory happen to anyone but it really makes you concerned since students rely on the security of their schools network to protect their important information. We as students use the school websites for virtually everything such as registration, paying tuition, managing student sensitive information. Suppose this hacker decided to take it a step further and steal personal data from the student body. As bad as this could be for the students it would be that much more worse for Harvard because of the impending lawsuits that may ensue from outraged individuals. I really worry about the rise of hackers in the recent years, although not all hackers are bad. There is ethical hackers these days but like anything in this world there will always be two sides to any coin.

Link to the article is here and all credit goes to PC World for its well written article. It's very informative and I urge anyone who is interested to check it out!

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,142589-page,1/article.html