Think of it as Frankenstein turning on its maker. Years ago UCLA played an active role in creating the Internet. Then several years later, it is used to steal personal information of 800,000 current and former UCLA students and faculty. UCLA might be proud of their computer science department but it’d be nice if the folks running the main computer system did a little better job locking down the database. As one of the 800,000, I’m more than a little miffed at their laxity.

How long did the attack last? A little more than a year.

Remember when all the little protesters were running around Westwood displaying their “outrage” over the well-deserved tasering of the jerk doing his own version of the Monty Python’s “Help! I’m being repressed“? While that was going on hackers were stealing all of their personal data. Not only was the protesters’ data taken, but so was data of the university cops, the “victim”, and everyone else at the school. In fact, most everyone who has been at the school for the past decade and many who only applied also had their identity stolen.

Now if instead of protesting for some dweeb who doesn’t know when it’s time to leave the library, if the good students decide to protest against against the school’s MIS brass then count me in.

So UCLA created the Internet only to fall victim to it. Kind of like the inventor of the car later dying in a car accident. An even better analogy, at least for those who know the intersection, is the notorious “roundabout” in Long Beach (the Long Beach Traffic Circle) where a persistent urban legend has it that Werner Ruchti who designed the traffic circle died in an automobile accident there, dying at the hands of his creation. That didn’t happen but the UCLA Internet theft certainly did.

tags: ucla hacking traffic circle

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 12th, 2006 at 9:19 am by Insider and is filed under (Un)education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.