JOHOR BARU: Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM)'s computer network in Skudai was disrupted recently after one of its servers was hacked by an unknown source.
The disruption continued for nine hours.
Prof Dr Safaai Deris from UTM's Centre of Information and Communication Technology (CICT) said the hacker began penetrating the CICT server on Jan 14.
The hacker did this by using an Internet Protocol (IP) address registered with a United States-based organisation.
"Analyses on the server's log showed the hacker had uploaded malware in a hidden file immediately after invading the server.
"The Distributed Denial-of-Service was activated from the server the following day.
"This disabled all main switches in UTM's main computer networks," said Safaai.
It is learnt the disruption, which ran from 7am to 4pm, was detected by an CICT team.
Members of the team realised something was wrong when attempts to access the university's network failed.
A UTM team took seven hours to revive the system and have it up and running again.
A source said the disruption led to minimal affects.
This was because most students did not have any lectures during the period of disruption.
The students were instead taking their semester examinations at this time.
Safaai said the university had already put in place more sophisticated preventive measures to prevent hackers from targeting UTM servers in future.
This included doing a comprehensive safety audit on the system.
Servers which were weak security- wise were also isolated.
The university is also studying how to use more effective monitoring applications.
A police report was lodged about the hacking incident.
Safaai said that a forensic analysis team from the Malaysian Communications And Multimedia Commission would be looking into the matter to help.
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