Jesus Christ.
I mean, I’ve ripped some people in my column this year. But come on, dude. OIT just made DOTS look like Mensa members.
If you don’t like reading the front page of newspapers, you should turn back and read Rich Abdill’s story on the front page today because it turns out there’s just been a slight security issue with our university accounts for the past three years. It turns out that anyone could get into any university account from anywhere without any kind of software or technical knowledge.
Come on, really? Like it didn’t even require someone to know anything about computers. It was easy. I don’t know how to work MySpace and even I could have stumbled upon the security hole.
That small oversight could have led to any number of wonderful public relations disasters for the university. There was just a solid three-year period when you could have gotten into Dan Mote’s account. Yikes.
I just don’t get it. When you’re the Office of Information Technology, you have one main job: Don’t screw up everyone’s stuff. And today we find out that if I thought my grade in JOUR 201: News Writing and Reporting I was unfair, I could have logged into my teacher’s account and changed it.
What if other departments screwed up this bad? Like if Dining Services accidentally left a door open for three years for ants to get into the food. Ants aren’t a strong enough example. It’s like they left the door open for poisonous scorpions to get into your food. Scorpions that could steal your identity or something.
Or if Resident Life literally left all the doors open so anyone could walk into your room and mess with all your shit. There we go, that’s a better example.
Or if Transportation Services had upped fees to pay for unnecessary meters. The last one was a bad example, but you get the point.
What more could they do, stab someone in the face? Well, an OIT employee might have done just that, allegedly stabbing someone in the face at a bar Saturday. This really hasn’t been a banner week for OIT.
It’s just such an unbridled disaster. This could have been a bigger monster than women’s basketball forward Marissa Coleman against Vanderbilt. It’s just sheer luck that someone figured out the problem and brought it to The Diamondback, instead of someone finding it and becoming a cyber-terrorist. We’re legitimately lucky today.
Three years! Three years where anyone could have gone to one of the dozens of computer labs where you don’t have to log in and then wreaked all sorts of havoc. So if someone didn’t like one of my columns, they could have changed my password, dropped all my classes, declined my financial aid and e-mailed all my teachers saying “screw you.” And I’d be left crying in the corner with no idea who to blame. Which is different than usual, because normally when I’m crying in the corner, I just blame God or something.
It’s crazy to think that during my entire career here, OIT has had a hole open in the system where people could have gotten into any account at will. OIT, you fail.
But don’t worry too much – remember that because of the loophole you could have just logged in and changed your grade.
Rob Gindes is a junior journalism major. He can be reached at gindesdbk@gmail.com.
