Category: news

Hacked, and possibly hijacked, one ID at a time

More than 22,000 current and former University of Missouri-Columbia students are the potential victims of identity theft after a malicious hack attack last week. How the hackers broke into the server is interesting. As noted in Computerworld, the attack came by way of a web form used to track the status of helpdesk queries.

IT staffers noticed unusual activity that began around 5:30 a.m. CDT last Thursday, then tied a large number of database query errors to the problem on Friday. Logs showed that the attacks ended at 9:34 a.m. Friday. That day, technicians disabled the account used to access the database from one IP address in China and another in Australia. The FBI was alerted on Monday.

“The hacker was able to reach the information by making thousands of queries over a span of hours, allowing the identities to be exposed one at a time,” the university reported.

Thanks to Wired Campus for the Computerworld link.

Marilee Jones’ bogus resume: Does it matter?

Writing in this week’s issue of Time, Michael Kinsley ponders whether MIT did the right thing by accepting admissions dean Marilee Jones’ resignation after she admitted that she had doctored her resume. Last month, Jones resigned after confession she didn’t have the academic degrees that were listed on her resume.

Wwhat a pity, though,” Kinsley writes in Time. “M.I.T. has lost an apparently great dean at a time when you don’t read a lot about successful university administrators. And, it turns out, she is one who had a personal as well as professional understanding of the stresses of our résumé culture. It would be a useful lesson for M.I.T.’s students if the gatekeeper who gets to award the golden credential of a degree from the world’s most prestigious technical institution is someone who lacks that kind of credential. It would say, ‘Don’t let it go to your head. An M.I.T. diploma isn’t necessary. In fact, it isn’t sufficient either. There are qualities that M.I.T.’s admissions office can’t sort for and its distinguished professors can’t teach. And as you go off to face the world with your M.I.T. degree, you may or may not have them.'”

Kinsley suggests MIT give Jones an honorary degree.

We’re coming up on the season when universities hand out these things with abandon, often to people who never saw the inside of a classroom at this, or sometimes at any, university. These folks get honorary degrees because they gave the university a million or two from piles so large you can’t even see the dent. Then she could go to the university health services and get another piece of paper stating that the résumé fib was the result of stress. She’s the expert on résumé stress, after all. And then let her go back to the work she apparently does so well.