Fergie's Tech Blog

Hackers Find Easy Target in Universities, Public Agencies

Sue Schultz writes in The Baltimore Business Journal:

If searching for porn online, a Web surfer might be directed to Johns Hopkins Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. It's not that Hopkins is branching out into a new business. But visitors who click on the esteemed department's Internet address are being redirected to sexually explicit Web sites.

The trend has universities, colleges and government agencies scrambling to keep hackers from muddying their good name and offending potential visitors. They're also trying to figure out a way to protect information from getting into the wrong hands.

"The universities and colleges aren't hosting porn, they are just helping the bad guys," said Alex Eckelberry, CEO of Sunbelt Software, a Clearwater, Fla., company that sells security software and researches and tracks hackers. "It's the plague of the Internet."

Hackers often get through holes in inadequately managed or updated security software, Eckelberry said. And the larger universities have more difficulty keeping hackers out.

posted by Fergie @ 8/10/2007 09:50:00 AM