GreenPrint repaired after server hacking
By Zachary Goldstein, The Dartmouth Staff
Published on Friday, April 2, 2004
Dartmouth's systems experts brought the GreenPrint system back into commission Thursday morning, days after the public printing mechanism's server was hacked into by intruders within the campus network.
"The intruders come in through the SQL ports where the print jobs are cached," said Director of Systems Services Dave Bucciero in an interview with The Dartmouth. "The intruders tunnel their data inside [legitimate] SQL data for disguise and get into the server."
The servers were hacked from on-campus computers that sent out these intruders from within the campus network. But Bucciero said that the hacking was not done intentionally. Rather, the corrupted computers were sending out intruders under the noses of the computer owners.
"The hacking is coming from internal machines," Bucciero said. "It could be from laptops brought back over break with viruses, or if the hackers are smart enough to break the border security and are using a campus computer to send from."
To solve the problem, Systems Services had to completely rebuild the GreenPrint system, clean it up, install a software firewall and bring it back online, which it did at 9 a.m. yesterday morning, according to Bucciero.
In order to ensure that students can print if the GreenPrint server is compromised again, Systems Services set up the BlitzMail computers near the Carson Hall GreenPrint stations to print to the GreenPrint printers -- even when the GreenPrint server itself is down.
Bucciero said that other public computers would be made capable of similar ad hoc printing if the server was again down for any extended period of time.