All Posts Tagged With: "hacking"
Student expelled for hacking gets job offer
Dawson College explains expulsion
A student expelled from a Montreal college for hacking into its computer system says he is considering a job offer from the firm that provided the cyber information program.
Ahmed Al-Khabaz says he has been offered employment by the president of Skytech Communications.
Dawson College held a news conference today where it justified its expulsion of the computer science student, saying he breached its code of professional conduct.
Continue reading Student expelled for hacking gets job offer
What students are talking about today (Oct. 4 edition)
Big Bird, full buses in B.C., hackers & Lena Dunham
B.C. Transit bus (scazon/Flickr)
1. In a poll, two-thirds of CNN viewers concurred that Romney came out on top. Romney didn’t win with the under-12 demographic, however, as he said he’d cut funding to PBS, home of Big Bird, because public television is not worth borrowing money from China to fund. Luckily for him, children can’t vote.
2. Transit users in Victoria, B.C. are being passed up by full buses more than twice often as predicted by B.C. Transit before they implemented “real-time tracking.” The agency suggests post-secondary schools should stagger class start times to reduce the problem. I have a feeling this isn’t just a frustration for B.C. students. Am I right?
3. Hackers called Team GhostShell have claimed responsibility for breaking into more than 120,000 computer accounts at dozens of universities to protest what they see as high-cost and low-quality higher education. Sites at the University of British Columbia and McMaster University were on the list of what’s called “ProjectWestWind.” Identity Finder, a data-protection company, found that more than 35,000 e-mail addresses and thousands of usernames were compromised. Most of the sites were the type made by professors themselves, reports The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Continue reading What students are talking about today (Oct. 4 edition)
What students are talking about today (Aug. 28 edition)
Hockey, marijuana v. IQ, sex drive, sea ice and Sarah Palin
Vancouver Canucks' Ryan Kesler (Loxy!!/Flickr)
1. University sports writers are being driven crazy by all this talk of another NHL lockout. Karen Aney of UFV’s The Cascade blames both the players and commissioner Gary “Buttman” Bettman. “Last time there was a lockout, we saw the emergence of poker. Seriously? That was the best that sports networks could do?,” she laments.
2. Teens who smoke marijuana regularly may suffer long-term brain damage according to a study that observed how IQ changed between the ages of 13 and 38 for more than 1,000 New Zealanders. Those who smoked heavily and early are most at risk. IQ dropped among those who were dependent on marijuana before the age of 18 by eight points on average. That’s a big drop.
3. Autumn is here and that means not just falling leaves but falling sex drives. A study that looked at five years of Google searches showed “strong and consistent” seasonal spikes in searches for pornography, online dating and prostitution in spring and early winter, with lulls this time of year.
Continue reading What students are talking about today (Aug. 28 edition)
Fixing the vote
The ups and downs of online polls in student elections
Photo by Cole Garside
Sarah Petz, a reporter with the Manitoban student newspaper, is disappointed that so few of her fellow students bothered to vote in last month’s University of Manitoba Students’ Union election. “At seven per cent,” she says, “the result is not very representative.” It’s not that there weren’t clear differences between candidates. There were. The Manitoban uploaded candidate interviews to YouTube and shared them on Twitter. It wrote about issues from printer breakdowns to the construction delays on the opening of the first campus pub. And yet, despite it all, only 1,900 of the 26,000 eligible students exercised their right to decide who will run the $1-million organization for the next year-long term.
But just because Petz was disappointed, don’t assume she was surprised. “Beyond a small group of highly active students,” she says, “no one seems to care.” Turnout is often low at the U of M. It’s not much better at the University of Toronto, where only 10 per cent of students voted this year, and worse at York University where turnout was just five per cent in 2011. But low voter turnout isn’t inevitable. Not anymore. At McMaster University, where students receive ballots in their campus inboxes that they can fill out on iPads, laptops or smartphones, turnout hit 33 per cent this year. That’s up from 24 per cent last year, 22 per cent the year before and much higher than the 13 per cent turnout in 2009, back before they ditched paper and pens.
Western hacker apologizes on YouTube
Police will criminally charge Keith Horwood
From keithwilliamh on YouTube
Keith Horwood, a Western University alumnus, admitted to being behind the hacking of the student union’s elections website earlier this week.
Shortly after online voting began Tuesday, students noticed references to Justin Bieber’s haircut, Selena Gomez and the “university erection.”
Horwood will be charged criminally, a campus police official told the Western Gazette.
Police said they had suspected Horwood before he released this video apology on YouTube.
Hacker attacks URegina website
Prof says breach may lead to more secure webserver
A screen shot of the U of R homepage in the Leader-Post showed that the perpetrator boasted their job with the messages “Hacked by Security Bus” and “Sorry admin your site has been hacked”.
Barb Pollock, U of R vice-president of external relations, told the Leader-Post that the site was down from 1 p.m. to 8 p.m Monday after it was discovered that it had been compromised early that afternoon.
Pollock said that while having the website down may have been inconvenient, the hacking was “no great concern at all.”
“It was a very small thing. (There was) no access through to other parts of our system. So there was no confidential information compromised at all,” she said, explaining that the breach didn’t appear affect the university’s more sensitive information such as financial, employment, and student records.
David Gerhard, a professor of computer science at the university told CBC News that he thought the scare may help improve the website’s security.
“Once people discover these little tiny cracks in security they can be fixed fairly quickly,” Gerhard said. “But if they don’t get discovered they can be exploited on a long-term scale by people who aren’t very nice.”
While the website was being fixed, staff and students were able to access services such as Webmail and online course information through a temporary website provided by the university, according to Global News.
Concordia unblocks Facebook
After installing a new firewall, university caves to pressure from students and faculty
Starting today, students and faculty at Concordia University will be allowed to access Facebook on the school’s wired network.
The school abruptly banned the popular social networking website in September 2008 to the outrage of many students. According to Concordia’s information technology department, security gaps in the university network were making it possible for hackers to use Facebook to access students’ personal information. That information was then being used to launch attacks on the university network.
At the time, Chris Mota, director of media relations at Concordia, told the CBC that the school was increasingly becoming a target of spamming and phishing schemes, and that the attacks were becoming increasingly sophisticated. For example, he said dozens of people had received fraudulent e-mails, purportedly from the IT department, that requested user names and passwords as part of an effort to upgrade the school’s web accounts. About 70 people responded to that e-mail.
In a press release issued May 1, the university said the decision to reactivate Facebook on the wired network was taken in support of the school’s mission. “Facebook has become an important tool for numerous Concordians, specifically in terms of collaboration with academia, researchers and colleagues. Based on feedback from staff and faculty, this website is beneficial to some university members in a variety of ways, from the advertising of campus events to student/faculty recruiting.”
In their decision to allow Facebook access, university administration cited recent improvements to security checks and procedures at the school, including the installation of a new network firewall.
