Mills College WeeklyA hacker was the cause of various computing services being
unavailable on Monday.
Director of Computing Services Marshall Northcott said they
discovered Monday morning that a hacker broke into Solaris, a
campus server, took control of the computer and used it to further
hack into other vulnerable servers.
“It exposes a lot of our secure information, like passwords,”
Northcott said. Computing Services disabled all services requiring
a password until security could be updated. The results were no
Mills e-mail, no file server access, no wireless Internet
connection, and no printing from PCs for all of Monday and much of
Tuesday.
Northcott said everyone on campus will have to change all their
Mills passwords the next time they login.
There is a very minimal possibility that confidential
information, like social security numbers, was leaked, according to
Northcott, who added that extra security measures are in place
around that type of information.
Northcott said they should be able to track where in the Mills
network the hacker went.
“Most [hackings] are crude, leaving footprints. They change
files which leaves changed time stamps [on the file], or network
traffic that shouldn’t be there, etc. If they’re really good you’ll
never know, but this wasn’t very tidy,” Northcott said.
