For the first time in more than two years, a hacker invaded Student Information Technology websites last Friday, compromising one of SIT’s machines and making SIT websites unavailable.
However, technicians solved the problem over the weekend and SIT president Richard Lingk said they are currently investigating the security breach.
“We did have an incident on Friday, but we noticed it in a couple of hours with some tools that we’ve developed over the years,” he said. “We got it under control right away. We fixed it over this weekend and used the time to do some upgrades we’ve been wanting to do.”
Lingk, a UW-Madison senior, was unwilling to disclose the specifics of the investigation, but said he is confident the hacker will be identified.
“We have to go through our log files that we have–it’s pretty intensive,” he said. “I don’t want to go too much into it because it just makes it easier for people to cover their tracks. It is currently under investigation and we will catch the people or person who did it.”
SIT, organized in 1996, is a student-run program that facilitates website production and maintenance for UW-Madison students and student organizations.
“The bulk of the system is managed by SIT,” Division of Information Technology employee Brian Rust said.
DoIT works directly with SIT to provide a network connection for the websites.
Lingk said although he does not know what motivated Friday’s incident, hackers generally want to cause trouble.
“Usually what hackers like to do is to break into a machine and use it as a point to break into other machines,” he said. “Or maybe just to snoop–who knows?”
However, Lingk emphasized that SIT websites remain unhurt.
“None of the people that use our service had any of their data lost,” he said.
“They’ve caused us some problems, but it’s been ironed out.”