University sites hacked for profit

In an apparent exploitation of security holes, for-profit hackers have uploaded unauthorized pages to hundreds of universities’ sites. None of the schools knew of the pages’ existence. Seems like that no personal info was compromised, those these pages were put in place to help the hackers make money.

Resource for this article: Hackers plant pages on university sites by Personal Money Store

University websites unwittingly host hacker pages

To create these unauthorized pages, these hackers exploited security holes in departmental, student, and uploading functionality. For-profit sites are the intended "target" of the links on these unauthorized pages. By having links and data on college and university websites, which are usually considered authoritative, the hackers are able to not only improve their rankings in search engine results and their profits, they are able to create the appearance that colleges and universities are endorsing their product. University I.T. departments confirmed that they did not know of the existence of these websites. At 3 p.m. Wednesday, many of the contacted universities were removing these hacked pages.

Unauthorized pages linked to "Street Smarts" company in Ohio

The business Street Smarts is the registered owner of the domain names belonging to the redirected websites and also the unauthorized sites. Attempts to call Street Smarts resulted only in being told “wrong number” when asking for the business or the technical contact listed on the website registration. Shortly after these phone calls, these websites were taken offline. In 2008, there was a comparable hack of both government and educational websites. The 2008 attack, rather than loading web sites onto dot-gov and dot-edu sites, used JavaScript to redirect those pages to latest-mortgages-rates.com, creditloansrates.com, and myhome-loan-expert.com. There is a phone number that is out of service in Texas listed on the educational web sites hacked. A search of that phone number revealed, however, hundreds more web sites with this exact very same JavaScript-coded redirect. The code on the redirected and unauthorized online websites appear to be nearly identical in ! CSS, JS, and HTML. Both attacks were likely perpetrated by the same business, in other words.

Personal information of students at risk

This hacking of educational web sites exploits the good name of schools and tries to make money off phony information. Thankfully, it doesn’t appear that the security holes that allowed these websites to be posted allowed any information out. Hackers could get data in to the web sites, but they couldn't get any out — probably. If security holes like this aren't fixed, though, they can later be used to gain access to data like social security numbers. Since higher education is happening online a growing number of often, security holes like this need to be closed as easily as possible.

The danger lurking within security exploits

Site visitors could have their personal info at risk from security breaches such as this, without the visitor ever knowing. On first glance, these hacker-created websites appear to belong on the dot-edu servers. Visitors who go to these websites and enter personal data might be opening themselves up to identity theft and fraud.

Schools that were affected

This is not a complete listing of educational institutions affected by this attack. This is only the first 50 schools that appeared in a search for unauthorized pages. You should do a very extensive search for these unauthorized pages if you are the webmaster or administrator for an educational website.

• Beacon University
• Harvard University
• McNeese University
• Northeastern Illinois University
• Cornell University
• Georgia Tech
• The Browning School
• Valparaiso University
• Los Rios Community College District
• East Central University of Oklahoma
• Rutgers University
• Yale University
• University of Texas Medial Branch
• Stony Brook University
• Saint Xavier University
• Hardin Simmons University
• Arizona State University
• Stanford University
• Austin Independent School District
• Smith College of Massachusetts
• Highpoint University
• Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
• Catholic Theological Union
• University of Washington
• Westminster Theological Seminary
• Lake Forest College in Chicago
• Southeastern Louisiana University
• American Samoa Community College
• Columbia College of Chicago
• University of Arkansas Fort Smith
• UC San Diego
• University of Scranton
• Piedmont Technical College
• Assumption University of Thailand
• Chemeketa Community College
• Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California
• University of Tennessee Martin
• The City University of New York
• Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design
• Instituto Guatemalteco Americano
• The University of Utah
• Juniata College
• Ohio State
• California State Christian University
• Sharif University of Technology
• The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Brigham Young University
• The University of Arkansas
• The University of Virginia