CANADA MONTREAL DAWSON COLLEGE EXPELLED 20 YEARS OLD STUDENT WHO CARRIED OUT TWO CYBER ATTACKS AGAINST THE COLLEGE WEBSITE MONTREAL — Dawson College’s administration defended its decision to expel Ahmed Al-Khabaz on Tuesday, claiming the 20-year-old carried out two cyber attacks against the school’s website. François Paradis, the head of Dawson’s IT systems, told reporters he gave Al-Khabaz a “slap on the wrist” and a firm warning after catching the student allegedly trying to hack into the school’s site on Sept. 22. He said a second attack occurred in October, prompting the school to expel Al-Khabaz and give him zeros throughout his college transcripts. But Al-Khabaz insists he was only trying to expose a series of flaws in Dawson’s network security. He says he stumbled upon a major vulnerability on the site’s student portal that could have compromised the personal information of about 250,000 students. After discovering the vulnerability he says he alerted the school’s IT department and Skytech Communications, the software company that designed Dawson’s site. Both Skytech and Dawson say they met with Al-Khabaz and commended him for his work. Two days later, Al-Khabaz ran another intrusion test on the college’s website to test it for vulnerabilities. That’s when the trouble began. “He didn’t just try to find vulnerabilities in the student portal,” Richard Filion, Dawson’s director general, said yesterday. “He went into a whole series of other networks, including the school’s financial databases.” In response to Dawson administrators’ news conference, Al-Khabaz argued Tuesday that it would have been impossible not to access other networks since the software he used to run the test automatically scans the entire site for weaknesses. “If I wanted to hack the site, I would have hidden my identity and I would have covered my tracks,” he said. Paradis also assured students that their personal information is secure and that the school’s IT department runs regular tests on its security system. Ken Fogel, the chair of Dawson’s Computer Science department, said Al-Khabaz violated the school’s code of conduct, and likened his actions to those of a burglar breaking into someone’s house. Representatives from the college said they could have chosen to contact police over the security breach but opted to resolve the issue internally. “If I was breaking into a house, I was breaking into a house that had my life inside of it and the lives of other students,” Al-Khabaz said Tuesday. “(Fogel) knows a lot but he doesn’t know more than me when it comes to this subject.” Since news of the young computer science student’s expulsion made headlines, he says he’s been offered 12 jobs, and even a scholarship from Skytech.
Posted on: Sun, 06 Oct 2013 06:43:31 +0000
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