14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier this week, some Anonymous hackers claimed to have breached into the systems of John Hopkins University. The educational institution admits that its systems have been breached.
The hackers published the names, phone numbers, email addresses and positions of Biomedical Engineering Department staff and the details of students who took the Design Team course.
The information was among the 103 Mb of data taken from the university’s databases. The hackers uploaded the stolen data to Mega, but it has been removed.
Johns Hopkins University spokesman Dennis O’Shea stated that they learned of the data leak after being notified by the FBI.
“This came one day after the department received what can only be described as an extortion message from someone claiming to be a member of the hackers’ group called Anonymous,” O’Shea said.
“The extortionist threatened to post stolen BME Department data if the university did not provide user ID and password credentials to access the university’s network. The university did not and will not provide that access,” he added.
An investigation has been launched by the university. The FBI is also looking into this case. However, so far, JHU says there’s no evidence that social security numbers or financial information has been compromised because the breached server does not store such information.
JHU highlights the fact that much of the stolen information is actually publicly available on the Biomedical Engineering Department website.
“The breach apparently occurred late last year, but came to light when someone posted on Twitter in January that the server was open to attack. The coding error that left a database on the server vulnerable was promptly identified and fixed, but the data had already been extracted,” O’Shea noted.
As far as the extortion accusations are concerned, in a statement published on Pastebin, the hackers said, “In reality, we had no intention to extort such access out of this university, we were merely trying to scare the [expletive] out of them.”
“For those of you who think this is harsh and uncalled for -- we say, ‘good.’ Anonymous doesn't [expletive] around. We gave you our demands, John Hopkins, you didn't reply, and now you are being taught a lesson,” the Anonymous hackers wrote.
“In addition, when we told the staff members of JHU that we had all their data and all their base, we explained that this would be entirely their fault if they did not comply.”