Calculated attacks turn up hundreds of thousands of vulnerable records at 100 universities across the globe, hacker group says

Dark Reading Staff, Dark Reading

October 2, 2012

1 Min Read

The hacktivist group TeamGhostShell says it has embarked on a new campaign to expose data and vulnerabilities at 100 of the top universities around the world.

In a posting on Pastebin Monday, TeamGhostShell released some 120,000 records from universities such as Oxford and Harvard. The campaign, which the group has dubbed "Project WestWind," has revealed vulnerabilities in university systems that could put hundreds of thousands more records at risk, the group says.

"After carefully filtering the [university servers] that we've already leaked before and the ones where Anonymous has in major operations, we have eventually got together a new fresh list," the posting says. "The majority of them should be here. Also, some of us decided to go ahead and add vulnerable links to the other ones anyway, which you can find at the bottom, at 'Other Universities.'

"We tried to keep the leaked information to a minimum, so just around 120,000+ accounts and records are here, leaving in their servers hundreds of thousands more," the group states. "When we got there, we found out that a lot of them have malware injected. No surprise there, since some have credit card information stored."

The group says its goal is to raise awareness of problems in the modern education system. The posting does not discuss how the data was obtained or how much data the group was able to expose.

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Dark Reading Staff

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