Anthony Sutoni was a brilliant computer programmer. He recently graduated at the top of his class in computer science. He was suggested to Ed by the University president, as a possible employee for Tower Ageis. Ed interviewed him and found him to be a little rough around the edges personally, but when he looked at his code, knew there was an affinity between them. Anthony was from Generation Y, a real whizz kid who loved the internet. He loved social bookmarking and his bookmarks ran into the several thousands. That’s how he acquired the nickname, Kid Digg.
Kid Digg ran the reports Ed was looking for. Apparently no real breach of the Firewall was made. It did what it was supposed to do. However, an unusually large amount of activity was found to have taken place the night of July 12th on port 80. That was the usual TCP/IP port that serves up the web pages for the University. After trying for hours to breach the firewall, whoever it was, just went through the usual port to try to find whatever it was they were looking for.
He took a look at the web access logs that Dan Cheadle was nice enough to provide on the disk. He ran some perl against the logs to filter out the IP in question. He found that it had crawled the University website. Not an unusual thing, since search engines do the same. But he found that the intrusion had happened across some web pages that were making calls to a database. One of them was broken. Apparently a programmer had forgotten to close his php tags and the connection string to the database was exposed. It looks like there was a successful breach here. The connection string provided read only access, but it was enough to look at the University’s entire database. Now the question was, what information were they gathering. Anthony took a look at the database himself with the same connection string. He could see that they were not storing credit card information. Perhaps it was a student that wanted to try to fix grades? Perhaps somebody was harvesting email addresses for a spam operation. Or perhaps somebody was looking for a candidate for identity theft. All possibilities that were enough concern to let the University know, something was up.
