Connecticut University Encounters Hack into E-mail and Website

According to officials of the University of Connecticut, hackers attacked the e-mail and website of the school during the weekend that probably led users to download malware, reported miamiherald.com, December 28, 2015.

On December 27, Tom Breen deputy spokesperson of the university informed around 11:00am how an organization namely Educause, which runs not for profit and manages the website of UConn, lost hold over the website's DNS entries. By DNS entries it means
the pair of Internet Protocol address and domain name which tells the computer program for Internet browsing about the source of website content from where the program must download the matter.

According to reports from Daily Campus, the attackers had compromised the DNS listing resulting in every visitor to the uconn.edu URL getting diverted onto one phony server, which the attackers controlled. The associated web-page showed one empty screen so during the loading of the website one message popped up forcing users to take down Adobe Flash Player's most recent edition so that the browsing exercise could continue. Opting for the OK button produced one file such as adobe_flashplayer_18.exe that naturally carried malware.

However, this problem was fast taken care of even as UConn's staff was able to get back admission into the school's DNS records. Nonetheless, the work was delayed as UConn found that MX records too had been maligned that had all the e-mail addresses ending with @uconn.edu. Consequently, it became hard for getting in touch with the ISP regarding any electronic mail sent from the university's official address.

Soon in Christmas, the school regained normal functioning while staff phased out the infected DNS entry for uconn.edu from servers of the DNS. Nevertheless, the website's visitors kept on getting the maligned popup for a while.

But according to Tom Breen, the university officials were working for figuring out the website's intruder as also what impact actually happened. He stated that the problem got detected as well as rectified, however, continued for a few end-users till they had refreshed their PC caches.

Additionally Breen said university administration didn't feel the incident would affect classes of winter intersession scheduled for beginning on Monday.

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