Stanford's Linux, Solaris boxes attacked

MULTI USER Solaris and Linux boxes at the prestigious Stanford University campus have been turned over by hackers.

According to an "advisory", or warning as we used to call it, put out by the university's Information Technology Systems and Services department its Solaris and Linux computers were the target of a "large number of sophisticated attacks by an individual or a group."

The hackers cracked or sniffed passwords, before local user accounts were escalated to root privileges by triggering a variety of local exploits, including the do_brk() and mremap() exploits on Linux and the sadmind, arbitrary kernel loading modules and passwd vulnerabilities on Solaris.

A University spokesman said the hacker was targeting academic and high performance computing environments, rather than indiscriminately attacking systems.

Is nothing sacred? [No, Ed.] µ