Wednesday, January 23, 2013

M.I.T.'s we site pwned because of Aaron Schwartz

Again:
This morning MIT's website was hacked and defaced, with its nameservers changed. The site credited hacker FBI informant Sabu (LulzSec); the site autoplayed The Star Spangled Banner and stated "R.I.P Aaron Swartz."

This was the second time in a week that they got pwned which brings to mind Oscar Wilde's great line from The Importance Of Being Earnest: To have lost one parent is a misfortune, to have lost two is carelessness.

Boy, I hope that MIT sure thinks that this was all worth it.  After all, third time's a charm!

2 comments:

Old NFO said...

Ouch, so much for security...

Ted said...

.....well, not exactly.

What happened was that EXTERNAL DNS ( web directory ) servers were redirected to a different web site and some external incomming mail was redirected for about an hour between 11am and noon EST Tuesday. Thoose of us who work at MIT and are inside the firewall saw no impact whatsoever. The Main website is my home "home page" on my office system and I never saw the "Hacked Page". There was no breach of the firewall.

MIT has promised a full report on the way they handled the Aaron Swartz incedent in the next few weeks.