Case Studies

The Case of the School-Boy Hackers

Several years ago, a well known boy’s school was subject to a significant incident involving computer misuse over a period of several months. The incident related to the hacking of the school’s network and the unauthorised acquisition of sensitive information.

For the full case study, please click here to download and review this case as a PDF file.

The Case of the Compromised Pharma

A few years ago we were asked by a well known pharmaceutical company to investigate a set of web servers that they believed had been compromised. They were only slightly concerned because although the servers concerned did have a registration and user login section this was only for users to gain information on available remedies and vaccines and not for the purchase of drugs which were handled by separate systems.

We investigated thoroughly and found that not only had the systems concerned been completely compromised but that the forensics evidence showed this to have been the case for many years. During the period the record showed that a number of different hacker groups from Germany and China had used the Pharma's servers for storage, messaging and warez.

Futher investigation determined that a SQL injection attack resulted in the harvesting of over 50,000 credit card details by the attackers. Even though the online purchasing of vaccines was performed by different systems these were not in-fact wholly separate and that the same user database was used commonly between the servers.

Our client acted immediately to address the vulnerability by taking the servers off-line until the problem could be addressed. Although we worked hard and rectified the issue rapidly, this incident cost the company financially in server downtime and reputationally after declaring the theft of the credit card details.

The company involved is now more proactive about the security of its web servers.