Apr 10 2008
Antioch University got pwned
In a rather embarassing incident, the main ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) server in Antioch University was broken in and about 60,000 students, former and current employers were compromised. The intrusion was due to the administrator’s failure to patch a critical flaw in the FTP daemon of the Sun Solaris server.
According to university officials, the intrusion was an automatted attack and was executed very quickly. Read more about it here.
Windows is not the only platform that has security vulnerabilities. In the recent “PWN TO 0WN” security contest, an Apple MacBook Air was hijack and another rooted via a zero day exploit of Safari.
In the first year Red Hat Linux Enterprise 4 was released, Red Hat issued 125 security advisories while Apple curned out 114 security updates at the end of OS X 10.4’s first year.
I urged that all administrators and users alike should be aware that no operating systems are immune to security exploits. Security patches should always be installed as soon as they are released and a lapse could be fatal.