You get online. No one is in the room with you, or so you think. You check your e-mail, surf the net for a couple of minutes and sign off.
In those few minutes, a hacker may have randomly targeted your Internet protocol address – your individual number for connecting to the Internet – according to Jim Dunham, associate professor of electrical engineering at SMU.
The hacking problem is growing at SMU and at college campuses nationwide, experts say. Hackers can attack by altering Web sites or even scanning computers for specific files.
Merlin Wilkerson, director of network and systems at SMU’s School of Engineering, said there has been a steady increase in hacking for the past two or three years at SMU.
Hackers have gained a lot of publicity lately, David Sossaman, a sophomore computer science major said. He believes that the publicity is leading to an increase in hacking because it allows hackers to become more sophisticated.
Some examples of recent hacking incidents at universities across the country:
At SMU, the engineering network has not directly been attacked, but it has taken on extra traffic, Wilkerson said. This traffic, or hits, are requests for specific files and URL addresses.
For one Microsoft file, the engineering network got thousands of hits, Wilkerson said. Such high traffic could cause the system to shutdown.
While Wilkerson and the engineering department receive numerous hits for files, that is nothing compared to what major university networks face.
“[The] engineering department receives 20 or 30 percent less [hits] than a major university network, and we see a lot,” Wilkerson said.
The engineering department protects its network with a homegrown firewall, a screening device that protects the network, and all the personal computers on the network have the latest software protection, Wilkerson said.
Sossaman said there are two groups of people who hack into Web sites: hackers and crackers.
Hackers are generally good people who hack into a site to let the owners know about loopholes in their security, Sossaman said. The hackers report their results to site owners immediately.
“The public never sees true hacking, generally,” he said.
Crackers are the ones who go into systems and networks with the intent to do harm, Sossaman said. They go into credit card databases to get personal information and perform denial of service attacks on Web sites.
A denial of service attack is spamming a Web site server with so many requests that the server shuts down. This can stop people from connecting to a server, and, in some cases from going online.
Hackers will steal from anyone, Dunham said. While they tend to hit registered IP addresses such as the SMU network, unregistered users, like Dunham himself, are also attacked. At home, Dunham uses an unregistered IP address.
Hackers will randomly type IP addresses in an effort to match an unsuspecting user. As a result, Dunham frequently checks his computer for hits.
On average, six hackers try to attack Dunham’s home computer each week. So far, none have been successful, he said.
“Fortunately, no one got into my computer,” Dunham said.
