UNSW Facebook site is hacked by the identity thief AGAIN in two days.

The University of New South Wales’ Facebook page was flooded with a series of images of porn stars and other inappropriate content in two embarrassing hacks.

Shortly before the UNSW’s Open day, images of semi-clad women and links to sex tips were posted on its Facebook page.  One of the posts displayed images of a porn actress Mia Khalifa, while others showed photos of women’s bottoms and breasts, instructions on how to French kiss and picture of guns.

 

Screenshot from UNSW Facebook page

The UNSW spokesperson said they found out its page had been hacked early on Saturday morning and tried more than three hours to reach the administrators in Australia and internationally.  After six hours, the UNSW managed to regain access to the site through other means and remove all the racy content.

However, the second bout of hacking on the UNSW Facebook page over the weekend began late on Sunday night.  The UNSW Facebook page started posting more lewd images, including images of soft core porn and sex advice and rather a weird link to the ‘best universities in Italy’.

Screenshot from UNSW Facebook page

Those posts hit a large numbers of likes and comments.  At midnight on Sunday, the UNSW published a Tweet stated that it alerted the hack.

Screenshot from Twitter @UNSW

So why had the UNSW’s Facebook page been hacked?

One told SMH that the intern had been handed the keys to the Facebook account, whereas some suggested that the UNSW staff must be drunk.   However, Hacklabs director Chris Gatford said that there were 2 possible scenarios for the embarrassing hacks:

1. Person who had the authorisations was trapped into providing the password, like phishing email
2. Hacker guessed the username and password barrier

The UNSW has long been exposed to cyber-attacks.  In 2013, students and staff were subjected to a number of intrusion attacks by unidentified hackers.  25 affected servers and a number of user accounts were shut down on Jan 5, 2014.

The hacking scandal affects the UNSW’s reputation, upsets potential students’ impression on the UNSW and makes the UNSW embarrassed especially when it failed to deflect the second hack.

The hacking scandals exposed the poor cyber security at the UNSW.  Sydney IT security expert, Troy Hunt criticized the UNSW for not implementing basic IT security protocols.  The cyber-attacks did tap into greater fears over the UNSW cyber security and the confidentiality of student information as in the university information system, it contains countless student data like health, academic records and contact details. Indeed, such hacking scandals are just reflecting the regularly occur cyber-attacks at universities across Australia.

Identity is everything.  We should not only take action after things happened, rather we should prevent it.  Here are some tips to prevent identity theft for personal/ organisation Facebook page.

1. Use two-step password system, known as a multi-authenticator login through a secondary source, such as an SMS
2. Only senior staff are allowed to hold the key information
3. Use a more complex password combination
4. Change the password more frequently
5. Prohibit IT staff from drinking during their shift

-KYCL-