New York Times: “Universities face a rising barrage of cyberattacks”
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.2513
The ‘lede’ paragraph from the most prominently placed article in the 17 July edition of the New York Times requires quoting:
America’s research universities, among the most open and robust centers of information exchange in the world, are increasingly coming under cyberattack, most of it thought to be from China, with millions of hacking attempts weekly. Campuses are being forced to tighten security, constrict their culture of openness and try to determine what has been stolen.
The story’s outlines can be seen in its quotations from officials:
* Bill Mellon, associate dean for research policy at the University of Wisconsin: ‘We get 90,000 to 100,000 attempts per day, from China alone, to penetrate our system. There are also a lot from Russia, and recently a lot from Vietnam, but it’s primarily China.’ * Larry Conrad, associate vice chancellor and chief information officer at the University of California, Berkeley: The university sees ‘millions of attempted break-ins every single week.’ * Tracy B. Mitrano, director of information technology policy at Cornell University: Cyberattack detection is probably the ‘greatest area of concern.’ * Rodney J. Petersen from Educause, a nonprofit alliance of schools and technology companies: ‘The attacks are increasing exponentially, and so is the sophistication, and I think it’s outpaced our ability to respond.’
What’s at risk includes not only academic openness but intellectual property, personal information, and professors’ hitherto taken-for-granted freedom from concerning themselves with inconvenient security countermeasures. The Times notes that ‘university systems are harder to secure’ than those of corporations, ‘with thousands of students and staff members logging in with their own computers.’ (The article never mentions national laboratories, where researchers work in alliance with university counterparts.)
The Times also emphasizes that much remains mysterious about the problem—for example, whether the hackers operate privately or governmentally. ‘Analysts can track where communications come from—a region, a service provider, sometimes even a user’s specific Internet address,’ the article says. ‘But hackers often route their penetration attempts through multiple computers, even multiple countries, and the targeted organizations rarely go to the effort and expense—often fruitless—of trying to trace the origins.’
And the Times notes the obvious parallels to other recent news, in particular the Times‘s own 31 January front-page report ‘Hackers in China attacked the Times for last 4 months ,’ which said that hackers possibly linked to the Chinese military had apparently looked for sources of material that had embarrassed Chinese leaders.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.