The servers at Central have been compromised, and we wanted you to get a heads up about handling your files:
Lisa: Please alert your students to back up all files residing on their server space here at the college on an external thumb or flash drive for a few days. We’ve seen some instances of student’s files becoming corrupt and anticipate a roll-back of data possibly prior to last week due to the attack described below.
Harriet: It appears that some “bad guys†are trying what’s called a “denial of service†attack on our SeattleCentral.edu world. This involves their hitting our net a zillion times, and it makes our website very slow.
The attack is on what’s called the “http†protocol, so if you access the college website by going to https://seattlecentral.edu (note the “s†added to http) it should work for you in spite of the problem.
Bill & Sara: Last week a student sent us a copy of some code injected into all of her files on Edison. There may be code injected into our PHP & HTML files, described in the following google doc:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ajmjwkk5jqfx_6dzjcbwdr
It looks like there has been some success removing this injected code, but its labor intensive, and there seems to be possible DB intrusion as well for those on Zephir.
PRELIMINARY ADVICE: Back up important files from Zephir/Edison to a thumb drive. Do not upload these to a different server!
We recommend:
1) Back up important files to a thumb drive or CD, no where else
2) Run a virus scan on the drive (if CD, do this before the burn)
3) Wait to see if your files on zephir/edison are effected by a rollback (reverting to an earlier version of all files)
4) Investigate recovering files from your thumb drive selectively, if they are effected by a rollback
Harriet & Lisa will inform us when things are in the clear, but we want you to be able to save your important files!