500 Melbourne Uni staff in hacker’s global education protest leak
- — 03 October, 2012 12:07
Anonymous-affiliated hackers protesting against the high cost of education and large student loans have published \more than 120,000 records from dozens of top universities, including the University of Melbourne.
Links to the files, posted on PasteBin by Team GhostShell, lead to the leaked database tables of staff and students from universities across the US, Japan, UK, Germany, Russia, Switzerland, Norway, Italy and Australia.
“Our targets for this release have been the top 100 universities around the world. After carefully filtering the ones that we've already leaked before and the ones where Anonymous has in major operations, we have eventually got together a new fresh list,” Team GhostShell wrote, labelling the campaign “Project WestWind”.
The only Australian university included in the hackers’ list was the University of Melbourne. The file contains system profiles of more than 500 engineering staff, which are listed alongside phone, email, username and in some instances a brief bio of their achievements. In some cases, the details leaked contain no more than what is available on the university’s web-facing staff profiles.
Each target’s leaked file contains a link to the page, presumably where the hackers exploited a flaw to access the database.
The group claimed “a lot” of the servers they accessed were already injected with malware.
“No surprise there since some have credit card information stored,” it said.
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