Thousands of hacking attempts – every day

Every day, tens of thousands of attacks are made against the university. But despite the high pressure, few manage to get through the defensive systems, according to Magnus Persson, responsible for IT security.

“The hacking attempts haven’t increased this year, but they’re continually changing their structure.”

About one year ago, the computers at The School of Social Work were hacked and almost a hundred hash codes belonging to the staff were taken. The hash codes didn’t lead to any sensitive information this time, but they can sometimes make it possible to decipher various passwords.

This autumn, several Swedish universities have been subject to similar attacks and in Lund, three people at Lunds universitets datacentral, LDC, are employed to monitor and control safety.

“It’s a constant game of cat and mouse. When we put up defensive firewalls the hackers change their approach”, says Magnus Persson, responsible for IT security at LDC.

The major problem today isn’t traditional hacking, but trojans that invade computers after they’ve been in contact with infected websites and links.

“Your computer can be captured by a botnet, and after that be controlled from another computer, chiefly in order to send spam. But trojans can also be used to collect information”, says Magnus Persson.

During last autumn’s attack on several Swedish authorities and centres of learning, among those the University of Linköping, it was botnets and also so called SQL-injections that were used when the sites were overloaded and infiltrated.

How many attempts is the university subject to every day?

“Our networks are continuously scanned, so we can see that there are attempts made all the time – even if they rarely are successful. We’re talking about tens of thousands of hacking attempts every day”, says Magnus Persson.

Which parts of the university are most affected?

“The parts of the university that have a decent knowledge of what’s going on, and that keep their computers up to date are less affected. The places where we mostly see infected computers are on our wireless networks, and unfortunately it’s mostly student computers. Most of the time the infected computers are private computers, the university computers are more rarely infected”, says Magnus Persson.

Text: Bengt Pettersson

Translation:  Matilda  Lundborg