Good news?

Today the University of Groningen in The Netherlands announced that they had been compromised. About 150 workstations were found to have a backdoor with keylogging functionality installed.

The interesting part is how the university found out about this. Namely through an anonymous phone call, most likely from someone involved in the hack.
This move by the hackers has led the university to believe that the intrusion was just for fun and without malicious intent.

I, on the other hand, am not so optimistic. Lately we’ve been seeing a number of stories where the hackers of university networks get caught. Therefore I think it’s much more likely that the hackers got cold feet.

By reporting their crime they were probably hoping that the university would forgive them and not follow up on the incident. After all, if the university decides not to press charges, the hackers won’t be investigated.

A nice example of social engineering – hack a network and then report it so the victim doesn’t press charges. Although I somehow doubt that it will become very popular with hackers around the world. 🙂

It would be bad news if the university decides not to press charges. In any case, the good news is that hackers seem to be wary of the authorities and unwilling to end up facing criminal charges.