NEWS Unknown attackers have compromised a large number of Linux and Solaris machines in high-speed computing networks at Stanford University, California, and other academic research facilities, according to a university advisory.
The attacks, which apparently compromised servers as recently as 3 April, are currently being investigated, according to an advisory posted 6 April by the Information Technology Systems and Services (ITSS) group at Stanford.
The ITSS said in its web advisory: "Stanford, along with a large number of research institutions and high-performance computing centres, has become a target for some sophisticated Linux and Solaris attacks. The attacker appears to be deliberately targeting machines in academic and high-performance computing environments, rather than attacking systems indiscriminately."
Members of Stanford's security team declined to comment, and the university's chief information security officer could not immediately be reached.
The Stanford advisory states: "The perpetrators regularly gain access to an unprivileged local user account, presumably by sniffing passwords, cracking passwords from other compromised systems, or by triggering vulnerabilities in remotely accessible services."
Such local vulnerabilities, as they are called, have led to several compromises on the servers used to host Linux development and distribution in recent months.
Robert Lemos writes for News.com
Comments
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1. Jeremy Chatfield
This is non-news, surely.
You report some unpriviliged account access to some Linux computers, when in the same news stream you report 20 vulnerabilities in Windows, many of which will lead to complete subversion of the host?
Password sniffing attacks can be defended against. Just require that all users of the supercomputers have only SSH (authenticated and encrypted) access and deny telnet/ftp access. This is trivial to fix and can be done by a system admin without access to the source.
Many of the Windows vulnerabilities that lead to a complete compromise of the system can't be defended against, without a Microsoft patch. That's serious and worrying.
2. anonymous
So your point is that Linux vulnerabilities should not be reported?
And the report does not refer only to password sniffing, read the article: "[...] sniffing passwords, cracking passwords from other compromised systems, or by triggering vulnerabilities in remotely accessible services."
Personally, I want to know about all vulnerabilities in all OSs. BTW the Linux kernel had to be updated twice this year to patch holes. If and when Linux will develop as fast and will be as used as Windows, it will "benefit" from the same amount of attention from hackers and it will be just as cracked.
(this is in response to Jeremy's comment)
3. anonymous
B... G.... new department "X" at work
4. anonymous
Hi
What about efficients security specialist in Freewares!
Change the others, they are out of date!
Linux and Solaris, are the safer OS, if they are awisedly used by professionals !
5. reb
show me a "truly" secure networked system !!!
there will alway's be someone somewhere trying to make systems secure and the harder they make the system to crack the better.
but there will alway's be someone somewhere who finds a way to get in
because its harder its a greater challenge !!!
look at citibank its been hit loads of times !
i should imagine (hope) the security deployed on the banks systems was superb and yet it gets hit (i do not know what o/s the bank uses (nor do i wish to know)).
whether you run microsoft or unix or apple or novel or whatever you run i guarantee someone, somewhere is trying to crack it.
my point being, so these machine's got cracked, find out how and plug the gap and make the challenge harder next time, who knows you may even win and stop them from doing it again.
then again pigs might fly oh look theres one now oink oink lol
so this one was on machines running linux, shock horror !!
no one ever said linux was cracker proofed did they?
just that linux is "more secure" and "more stable" and maybe "cheaper tco" no o/s is cracker proof.
and no i am most definately not a cracker