Duke Temporarily Shuts Down Websites Amid Global Cybersecurity Threat
“Taking some sites completely offline was a targeted precaution and … allowed teams to address the security risk directly while minimizing disruption to other services.”
Sounds pretty serious. At least it gave the IT people at Duke an interesting day.
The Duke Chronicle reports:
Duke temporarily shuts down many University-hosted sites after reported global cybersecurity threat
A large number of Duke-hosted websites were shut down Wednesday as a precautionary response to reported global software vulnerabilities.
Earlier in the day, the creators of PHP, a foundational programming language, disclosed vulnerabilities in their software that could affect up to an estimated 70% of the internet. At Duke, WordPress, which was written in PHP, supports many online platforms and hosts roughly 40% of all online sites. As a result, the University’s Information Technology Security Office announced that affected Duke websites would be unavailable until their software was patched to protect from hackers.
The National Security Agency’s cyber division announced that the reported PHP vulnerabilities “often provide a direct path to the server’s file system or database,” potentially exposing personal or sensitive information to hackers. However, Duke IT Security said University data is safe for now.
“As of Wednesday afternoon, we have no evidence any information has been compromised as a result of this vulnerability. Duke IT security is continuing to investigate,” wrote Chief Information Security Officer Nick Tripp in a Wednesday email to Duke faculty, staff and students.
Vulnerable University-hosted websites were shut down as of 10:09 a.m. Wednesday and rendered not “reachable internally or externally,” according to an IT status page. Although certain Duke sites remained operable throughout the day, many others including Duke Today, the Student Affairs website and connected webpages — like Duke Student Health — were temporarily unavailable.
After PHP released a version update Wednesday correcting the flaws, Duke was later able to restore access to its critical websites by 5:28 p.m. But some University-hosted sites remain unavailable as IT staff continue installing security patches and validating affected systems. A University spokesperson did not respond to The Chronicle’s request for comment as to when the remaining websites would be restored.
“After receiving credible reports that the PHP vulnerability was being actively exploited beyond Duke, Duke’s IT Security Office took immediate steps to protect potentially affected websites,” a University spokesperson wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “Taking some sites completely offline was a targeted precaution and … allowed teams to address the security risk directly while minimizing disruption to other services.”
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Comments
Why are we singling out Duke as if the issue hit them in particular? Everybody who owns a server had to hustle yesterday because of these bugs. I had to spend an hour or so remediating my own. I got two emails about the issue from Granicus about “temporarily not being able to access my account” while they fixed the issue. I didn’t even recognize the name at all as anybody I had ever dealt with, then did a little research and discovered they are in charge of all the .GOV websites like Medicare, Social Security, and the like. The fact that Duke was also hit is entirely irrelevant.
70% of the internet and 40% of web sites, my muscular buttocks. Their numbers are as gamed as a pre-election voter suppression push poll.
Suppressing the rant here… of course this happened. And the solution is same as escaping AIs, perma-hijacked PCs and phones, endless “data breeches”, and infra this and that collapsing now and again. And they won’t do it until the zeitgeist gets a dose of unsafe at any speed, by design (mostly omission.)
Ama Micro Goog Book may eventually force that clue into the dimwits through their ever escalating abuse. But not yet.
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