The Buccaneer

Issue date: 12/5/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Masamune Shirow Calling card of mischief, this image appeared on several defaced PUB computers. Taken from the popular anime series "Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex," this emblem is used by a notorious hacker in the fictional show.

In the wake of The Buccaneer article on the Pirate Union Building computers and campuswide Wi-Fi, questions were raised and boundaries tested by both the nervous and the fearless as to just how secure are our campus networks.
All it took to compromise the Peninsula College PUB computers was the name of the program designed to keep malicious users at bay. "Deep Freeze," an industry standard in system administration and kiosk security, found itself vulnerable to a would-be hacker on campus grounds. According to Steve Baxter, director of Information Technology Services, this isn't the first time that pranksters have tampered with school computers.
"Every now and then we have someone who tests our network or will do something to the machines, but it tends to be for attention or thrills. Most of our campus computer security challengers get bored and go away on their own," Baxter said.
The PC IT department has ways of tracking malicious users on campus. Switch-level control tells the network administrators exactly from what building and area a malicious user might be accessing the network, particularly spikes in bandwidth usage. While individual websites are not logged by the campus systems, media access control (MAC) addresses are and that could spell big trouble for someone caught violating school policies.
A MAC address, for those outside the sphere of IT-speak, is essentially the physical address of a computer's hardware. Unlike IP addresses, a MAC address never changes as it's associated with the microchips used for network communication. With MAC addresses logged and network traffic monitored, IT staff can trace suspicious network activity down to a particular area on campus and even the model of the computer transmitting the data.
In the case of the recent PUB computer security issue, it was not the network compromised, but an exploit in the administration software done locally. "Once we figured out how they were getting into our system, it's easy to reload the machines affected," Baxter explained, citing the current PUB prankster as an irritation rather than a threat.

Continued...

Page 1 of 2 next >

Article Tools