Harvard Site Hacked and Then Leaked on BitTorrent
Posted February 18th, 2008 by Alex Ion
You know the saying “it can happen to the best of us”? Though Harvard is not the most secured place in the world, we expected better security from them. Apparently, the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences website has been hacked and the content is now leaked on BitTorrent.
“This is the backup of gsas.harvard.edu. We have release it because we want demonstration the insecurity of harvard’s server. [....] Maybe you don’t like it but this is to demonstrate that persons like tgatton(admin of the server) in they don’t know how to secure a website.”is what you can read in the .nfo file. I guess the hacker made his point, even if it’s sloppy English.
The Pirate Bay are already tracking a 125MB zip file that is supposed to be a server backup of the site with a full directory structure, before the hit. It contains three databases, joomla.slq the main database, contacts.sql which is a database of contacts and hgs.sql which may not be that important. Another bad thing is that the file is supposed to contain passwords, too.
Right now GSAS is down, so I can only speculate they are trying to fix this major security breach. Can you imagine how Thomas Gatton (the admin) is feeling right now, because he’s a Systems Administrator and User Support Specialist at Harvard.
