14 DAY TRIAL // Last week, the University of Colorado at Boulder officials said that three of their computers were hacked and information of about 9,000 students and 500 employees was put in danger. According to various reports, the university administrators spotted the attack only when the computers restarted themselves without any reason. After further investigation, it has been discovered that the systems contained some sort of spyware which could be used by an attacker to infiltrate into the computers and access the mentioned data.
After several days of investigations, the University of Colorado at Boulder representatives came out and explained that the glitch wasn't actually a hack attack because the auto-restart occurred due to weird behavior of an application installed on the computers. According to Network World, the software that caused the whole fuss was actually the ATI driver application which restarted the computers every once in a while.
However, the university authorities are now struggling to improve the security of the computers, as this alarm signal brought the weak security measures back in the spotlights. According to the same source, the University of Colorado wants to help employees become more skillful when it comes to the security of the computers and avoid data losses just from the beginning. One of the ways to reach this goal would be to avoid storing private information such as the Social Security number of the university computers, Network World reports.
There were multiple hack attacks in the past, when universities around the world saw their computers compromised and information belonging to students could fall in criminal hands. However, this is quite a special case because we're not actually talking about a real hack attack but about a fake one which, besides causing a lot of fuss around the university, brought into discussion the weak security measures the institution uses. Anyway, maybe people should think twice before screaming for help because they got hacked...