Hackers Target WSU Computer System Recent Publicity About School’S High-Tech Services May Have Prompted Pranksters

Sometimes it doesn’t pay to be the nation’s most wired state university.

Computer hackers accessed Washington State University’s UNIX servers over the weekend in what WSU officials believe may have been a prank in response to the school’s recent ranking as the most wired state university in America.

The ranking appears in Yahoo Internet Life magazine’s May issue.

Director of Information Technology Mary Doyle said recent publicity about WSU’s high-tech services may have made the school a target.

“With the world going toward everything being Internet-based, the opportunity for this kind of thing increases on a daily basis,” Doyle said.

The problems started Saturday morning when WSU staffers noticed access to the WSU home page had been diverted to a bogus site with the message “Time to Celebrate,” and later to a site that said “The Matrix Has You.”

While assessing the problem, WSU computer crews noticed that some passwords had been compromised and made a plan to fix the disruptions by incrementally taking some services down, making adjustments and bringing them back up, according to WSU information technology officials.

One of WSU’s UNIX servers that handles e-mail failed around 3 p.m. Saturday and some new e-mail received and not read between 10 p.m. Friday and 3 p.m. Saturday was lost in the process. On Monday, WSU announced as a temporary precaution it would shut down all remote access to e-mail from local Internet service providers and services such as America Online or Prodigy. Students and professors wanting to check their e-mail from off campus dialed in direct through a pool of WSU modems, which experienced heavier use and frequent busy signals as a result.

Ironically, some of the disrupted services - like accessing e-mail and the Internet from a distance - are what won WSU acclaim by Yahoo.

Information Technology employees are working to tighten security, correct the problems and limit disruption, Doyle said.

“We don’t know what (hackers have) done or haven’t done in some cases so we are trying to be as thorough and cautious as possible, as well as trying to restore services as quickly as possible.”

The extent of problems is still unclear, Doyle said. The biggest impact was for those people trying to check their e-mail from outside WSU’s modem pool.

Dennis Haarsager, director of educational technology, said Monday that WSU canceled his e-mail account after someone apparently used his password to access his web page.

“People do hacking just for fun usually, just to see if they can do it,” Haarsager said. “Lighting struck here this time.”