Tag Archive for: universities

City of Oakland, Irish and Israeli universities suffer ransomware attacks

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The city of Oakland, California, has fallen victim to a ransomware attack, forcing the city to shut down its systems.

The City said in a statement that the attack has not impacted critical services such as 911 dispatch, fire and emergency resources, which continue to operate normally.

The City’s Information Technology Department (ITD) is working in coordination with law enforcement to investigate the attack and restore impacted services. The City says it has initiated a plan to respond to the attack based on industry best practices.

The public has been informed that there may be delays.

“We are actively monitoring the situation and sending updated information as it becomes available,” the statement reads.

The identity of the gang behind the attack is yet to be determined. The City has not yet disclosed any information about ransom demands or data theft from the compromised systems.

Oakland reporter Jaime Omar Yassin was the first to break the news on Twitter last week.

Last year, Yassin reported that the City’s IT department was understaffed and vulnerable to ransomware attacks.

Munster Technological University data leak

Munster Technological University (MTU) in Cork, Ireland confirmed on Sunday that the data stolen in a recent cyberattack is now available on the dark web.

The university said in a statement that its technical advisers and the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has informed it that specific data was accessed and copied from MTU systems during the ransomware attack and now made available on the dark web.

The NCSC has been assisting the MTU since the incident.

While the institution said it was not feasible to fully determine the exact nature of all data, including personal data affected or the identities of all people impacted by this leak, it has started informing those possibly affected.

MTU is also advising people to be wary of possible phishing attacks, providing advice on how to protect themselves from them.

The university claims it has taken precautions to safeguard its students and employees by deploying all of its resources in the investigation of the attack, with support of professional forensic experts and the NCSC.

In addition, the MTU has secured an…

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Watch now: Central Illinois universities wary of cybersecurity threats | Local Education

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NORMAL — Illinois State University is working to address several potential cybersecurity weaknesses identified in its most recent state audit. The changes come as universities across the country are working in a constantly evolving cybersecurity landscape.

The audit from the Illinois Auditor General identified weakness associated with the formal information technology policies as well as more specific issues around the management of application accounts. Released May 26, the report covers the period from June 30, 2020, to June 30, 2021.

Dan Taube, chief information security officer for the university, said ISU staff members are working to address the issues brought up in the audit, and to make continual efforts toward keeping the university’s networks safe.



Dan Taube

Taube


Those efforts include formalizing updated IT policies, which are central to making sure all 60,000 accounts that interact with the ISU network are not becoming vulnerabilities, Taube said.

“The truth about cybersecurity is it’s everyone,” he said.


Illinois State University’s financial audit summary for fiscal year 2021 from the state auditor’s office.


Other steps ISU has taken to address weaknesses include improving communication to delete accounts from some applications soon after an employee leaves the university or changes jobs.

Managing what accounts have access to certain data can help address the issue with measures such as limitations on what student accounts can access, FBI Springfield Computer Scientist Justin Harris said….

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Security firm Veracode sponsors $15K hacking competition for universities

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The application security testing firm Veracode announced Thursday it’s sponsoring an ethical hacking competition featuring teams from eight U.S. and U.K. universities and will award $15,000 in prizes.

Running from March 15 to 26, the Hacker Games — an apparent nod to the teenage battle royale series “The Hunger Games” — will pit groups of student coders against each other as they attempt to find vulnerabilities in real pieces of software. The contest, the company said, will “explore practical examples of real-world threats” and challenge students to either exploit flaws or patch them before they can be compromised.

The company said the competition was motivated by a statistic from the Department of Education that just 3% of bachelor’s degrees awarded by U.S. colleges include cybersecurity-related skills, while just 5% of computer science degrees awarded by British schools meet that standard, according to the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre.

“With mounting pressure on developers to deliver software that is secure and keeps society safe from harmful cyberattacks, gaining foundational security knowledge translates to fewer exploitable problems during production and after deployment,” Chris Wysopal, Veracode’s chief technology officer and one of the company’s co-founders, said in a press release.

Before founding Veracode in 2006, Wysopal — whose code name is “Weld Pond” — was part of a hacker collective known as L0pht, members of which were among the first cybersecurity experts to tell members of Congress, in 1998, just how vulnerable the internet is to malicious activity. The group also included Pieter “Mudge” Zatko, who was hired last November as Twitter’s head of security.

Based in Burlington, Massachusetts, Veracode has seen its value rise in recent years, first being acquired in 2017 by CA Technologies for $614 million and being sold the following year for $950 million to the venture capital firm Thoma Bravo.

The participating U.S. schools include Stonehill College, Indiana University, Tufts University and the University of Virginia. U.K. schools include University of Birmingham, University of Warwick, University of York…

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Under the shadow of uncertainty, students of foreign universities hope to pursue their dreams

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PUNE Anush Chauthai, a 25-year-old student, was all set to fly to Canada on March 28, 2020 to pursue a university specialised course in Digital Forensic and Cyber Security when the lockdown in India grounded his plan.

Anush is among the many students pursuing degrees or wanting to study from the foreign universities whose plans have been disrupted by the Covid pandemic. Their period of uncertainty has now changed into anxiety as the virus-related restrictions have extended in many parts of the world.

“I had begun the application process for permanent citizenship in Canada two years back. After I received the clearance documents around March 13-14 last year, I had planned to leave on March 28, but all flights after March 20 were cancelled,” said Anush of Sinhgad road, who did his Masters in Computer Network from New Zealand.

Like, Anush, another student Rohit Mahajan, a city architect, who wanted to pursue a post graduate degree in Construction Management from a university in the United States, had to postpone his date of joining the course due to the pandemic.

“I had applied in August last year for the spring batch. It was supposed to start in January 2021. I had finalised to join the Texas A&M university. With the Covid outbreak, I waited till October-November hoping that the number of positive cases will drop. By December, I decided that come what may, I will go to the US and I started applying for the visa dates, but could not get the dates. I was told that there was a lot of backlog of previous applications as the visa offices were closed. Hence, I differed my intake to fall in July-end,” said Rohit.

Meanwhile, most of the students who were studying in China and returned to India after they were evacuated last year are continuing their education online. Though, after a year, they are trying to get adjusted to the routine of virtual classes.

On January 31, 2020, Jaydip Devkate, a 21-year-medical student from Pimpri-Chinchwad, left his college located in Xianning city in Hubei province in China with her 30 batchmates to return to India. He was looking forward to resume offline studies when the Covid situation would normalise.

“We are still waiting for the official…

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