UNT has had a little snafu in the computer security department. To anyone’s knowledge they have no idea who did it but in talking to someone last night I found out that a portion of the information was accessed via a web browser. Now that is comforting. A search engine bot was able to go out, scan information that they had stored off, and for the right set of keystrokes, it could be tapped into by anyone in the world.

Let’s clarify – a hacker hacked one of their servers and got in. This is hacking. Someone accessed information through a web browser. Not hacking – just a big f*** up by UNT. Out of all this, the online access is what I find the most disturbing.

In my ethics class it was discussed one day how anyone could call up to the university and access the information of another person. I always found things in that area to be very lax. So lax that when my sister ran into an ex that I would much rather believe was captured by aliens, never to be seen or heard from again, and then told him that I was going to school there, I was a little disturbed. I am not saying that the registrars office is totally falling down on the job, but if there was one person that could call up there and get information out of someone it would be him. Luckily, nothing materialized. Hopefully he caught a ride back to the mothership that night.

As of this morning, the FBI has not been contacted. I would attribute this to the UNT officials wanting to keep the whole investigation on the down-low. What if it were one of those demonic TAMS students? I think we all know what happens when one of those little turds does something wrong – nothing. I had physics with them. That was when I learned just how evil they really are. When everyone else was slaving away in the homework lab, spending more time on physics than any other class, they had their little spreadsheet handing them the answers and jacking with the homework averages. They also cheated on the tests – bringing in scratch paper with notes already on it, programming their calculators with formulas, one person dropping a test and another picking it up, etc. After three tests had come and gone it was reported. The instructor said that if they came forward and confessed they would take a zero on the last test and they would not be reported to the university. One or two did, but the number of people that cheated was closer to thirty. If you have cheated on, and as a result of said cheating, you have gotten good grades on all the tests, and you have all A’s on the homework because you have been using the spreadsheet, even if you did turn yourself in, it wouldn’t make a huge difference since this was one regular test. But then again, why bother if the difference will be minimal and God-forbid anything soil the Harvard application?

I guess I should be more concerned but I am not (I looked up my stuff and I am not affected… maybe that’s why). I am more disappointed that this has happened at the school that I attended. Someone dropped the ball and left the door wide open. The whole thing with the internet portion has me wondering what you had to search for the get the information that was accessed through a web browser. I would be willing to bet that even if UNT has removed the file in question the information will still be cached out on the internet. When it comes to information access at UNT maybe someone needs to be hired to come in and clean house and get rid of the folks that let this occur.