Harvard Site Hacked and Leaked Onto PirateBay

Via DailyApps -

The Website of Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences seems to have had what you call major security breach. The whole of the website complete with Server backups, Databases of Students, Site Databases, and the Complete directory structure have been leaked onto BitTorrent.

At the time of writing this, a 125MB Zip File is being tracked by Pirate Bay.

According to Torrentfreak, the Harvard University website has become a victim of a major security breach. A Torrent that is currently available on Piratebay claims to be a complete backup of the Website of Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

The Torrent basically contains a 125MB Zip file that contains the entire directory structure of the site, and the major database backups. Details of the databases are below :

joomla.sql - claims to be the database for the Harvard site
contacts.sql - claims to be a database of contacts
hgs.sql - stated as ‘other minor thing’

Here’s what the release notes from the Torrent reads as in Broken English : ” Maybe you don’t like it but this is to demonstrate that persons like tgatton(admin of the server) in they don’t know how to secure a website.”

The guy basically refers to Thomas Gatton, Systems Administrator and User Support Specialist at Harvard. Not much is known about the reason behind the security breach. And also at the moment the site that was hacked seems to be down.

I am waiting for Harvard to come out with a clear explanation as to what is happening. At the moment the files contained in the Zip seem to be the real deal.

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Ouch!

There really isn't another way to spin this story.

Harvard can't claim that the attacker didn't access the database on the site, if he dl'd the whole thing and then handed it to everyone in the world.