The University of Arizona is looking for ways to improve computer security after being targeted by a hacker group that claims to have breached dozens of university websites around the world.
UA officials say no harm resulted from the recent attack that may have originated with a group that calls itself Team GhostShell and launched the attacks ostensibly as a protest against the higher-education system.
The UA has firewalls to safeguard sensitive data, but the hackers circumvented them by tampering with websites that are in the public domain, said Michele Norin, the university's chief information officer.
Three UA computers - two in the school's engineering department and one in computer sciences - were accessed, but it seems no sensitive information was compromised, she said.
"We're still uncovering exactly how they did this," Norin said Thursday.
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"What we think occurred is that they were somehow able to take the URL, the address of the website, and manipulate it in a way that allowed them to access the machines on which the websites reside," she said.
The UA has installed countermeasures on those machines and is investigating in more detail to see if any other changes are needed to beef up security.
Hacking is an ongoing threat for many organizations, and the UA's prevention systems work well for the most part, Norin said.
"When we have these incidents we always use them to figure out if there's something else we could do."
The hackers also claim to have accessed websites at Arizona State University, the University of Colorado, Harvard and the University of Michigan, as well as at schools in Japan, Canada, Russia, Italy, Germany and Australia.
The Chronicle of Higher Education, a news source dedicated to higher-education issues, said the overall impact of the attacks was minor.
Contact reporter Carol Ann Alaimo at calaimo@azstarnet.com or at 573-4138.
