By Scott B. Wong
Daily Bruin Staff
Computer hackers successfully broke into the English department
Web site over President’s Day weekend, erasing its homepage
and brandishing a message of victory in its place.
The intruders, who may have gained access to the system as early
as Thursday, claimed responsibility for the misdeed with the line
and signature, “Hacked (DEFACED and OWNED) by – – – THE
KILLERS.”
Gail Fuhrman, manager of the English department, said the
hackers’ efforts were harmless.
“It didn’t kill us; it didn’t do anything.
People are out there just playing,” she said. “The only
people it inconveniences are people trying to access information
from the site.”
Fuhrman didn’t think the hackers were targeting the
department, nor did she see a need to contact university
police.
“It would be very time consuming and not worth
pursuing,” she said.
This is not the first time hackers have broken into the English
department’s Web site.
Hackers raided the site over winter break, according to Juan
Tan, computer support coordinator and Webmaster for the
department.
But the hacker signature from winter break was written in
Portuguese, and was different from the one which replaced the
department’s homepage ““ the only file tampered with
““ over the weekend, Tan said.
The computer system, he added, detected the exact time hackers
saved changes to the Web site at 9:54 a.m. Monday.
About twelve hours later, he was informed via e-mail that
someone had hacked into the site. It was only a matter of minutes
before he restored the page, he said.
“Since this was the second time this happened, I had saved
a copy of the default page,” he said.
Tan is taking measures to prevent this type of incident from
happening again, but said it is difficult to ensure that security
is completely reliable.
“I don’t think any Web site is 100 percent
hacker-proof,” he said.
Many hackers are able to break into computer Web sites and
systems by accessing “hacker sites,” which provide a
forum for hackers to share information. Like Fuhrman, though, Tan
said he didn’t feel the weekend trespassing caused any real
harm.
“It’s more a nuisance than someone coming into your
house and stealing,” Tan said.
UCLA Information Technologies Security Coordinator Kent Wada
said these types of computer system attacks are not specific to
UCLA, but are global problems.
“I do know that the IT infrastructure (at UCLA) is being
probed for signs of weakness,” he said. “But
we’re not particularly more vulnerable than anybody
else.”
Wada said he suspects there will always be an ongoing battle
between hackers and those trying to maintain computer security.
“As long as there will be ways to protect these systems,
there will be new and novel ways to attack them,” Wada
said.