A student at Florida State University Panama City hacked into his school's network and redirected users to meatspin.com upon entering their browsers. In case you don't know what the website is all about, let us sum it up for you in four words. "Two guys having sex".The school, upon knowing the incident, shut down public access to its wifi network and immediately implemented system upgrades. Users now are required to login in order to access the network like most schools in Singapore.
The hacker, Benjamin Blouin, 26, said that "That's how it should be. That's how it is on every campus." Blouin stated that he has been trying to bring across the importance of securing the school's network ever since last year.
Police arrested Blouin after 30 minutes of investigation with the network administrators. He never denied redirecting the users but claimed that he did not choose the site they would be redirected to.
The application that he used used meatspin as the default redirected site and thus users were forced to watch that particular clip, possibly scarring them for life.
Blouin has been suspended from school and had to spend a night in jail.
Article via NewsHerald
Possible consequences
This shows us how vulnerable our networks are without securing the access points and letting anyone have access to the network.
Firstly, outsiders can hog the network bandwidth with active torrent downloads and such. This will potentially slow down Internet access for the school's staffs and students.
Secondly, hackers can hack into the network and obtain details of anyone who is connected to the network to procure confidential information. This compromises the security of the users and can possibly put the school in danger too. A virus attack is also possible if they have access to the network.
Tips to secure your network
- In order to prevent the same thing from happening to you, always secure your access points with WPA or higher grades of security protocols to foil hackers' plans to hack into your network.
- You can also use MAC filtering, whereby only a certain set of MAC addresses are allowed access to the network.
- Implement host based firewall on your own computers to deny hacker's attempt to get inside your computer.
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