Educause Security Discussion mailing list archives
Re: Proxy stealing journal access
From: Gary Warner <gar () CIS UAB EDU>
Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2014 09:10:24 -0500
We have seen several indications in the past of students "sharing" their journal access with the entire internet. It has frequently been associated with Chinese access to the journals. Watching the logs on your subscription databases is a great way to find compromised university accounts, because it is one of the few "things of value" shared by every university student/faculty/staff. Searching for you university with the Chinese characters: 用户名: and 密码: is often a useful exercise. My whole Google search (sorry if the list "de-Chineses" this for finding these is this: 密码: 用户名: userid: password: databases lexisnexis (This is a useful exercise because the lists people post usually have some of the login information in english and some in mandarin. swap out the word "lexisnexis" with things like "elsevier" "springer" "Academic onefile" to find others.) If you only want "really fresh" ones, you can add a limit like "last 30 days" on your Google search. The freshest one I see is from Sep 27, 2014 ... www.expaper.cn/forum.php?mod=forumdisplay&fid=143&filter=typeid&typeid=224 Which is a thread for people to share passwords for accessing Academic resources at other libraries. This one from May had a TON of University database passwords: www.qc-lab.com/news/bencandy.php?fid=67&id=1465 Also a great reminder that we should not have "shared" passwords for these. Many of the examples given have a password of "library" or "password" or the "userid = password" things like "libustc" as both userid and password. ---------------------------------------------------------- Gary Warner Director of Research in Computer Forensics The University of Alabama at Birmingham Center for Information Assurance and Joint Forensics Research 205.422.2113 gar () cis uab edu ----------------------------------------------------------- ----- Original Message ----- From: "Roger A Safian" <r-safian () NORTHWESTERN EDU> To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU Sent: Tuesday, October 7, 2014 8:14:10 AM Subject: Re: [SECURITY] Proxy stealing journal access It doesn't happen to have Spybot on it? There's some sort of issue there with opening a proxy, but, that doesn't seem like the port I recall.
-----Original Message----- From: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU] On Behalf Of Andrew Daviel Sent: Monday, October 6, 2014 9:28 PM To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU Subject: [SECURITY] Proxy stealing journal access We have an institutional subscription to a number of scientific journals, where our IPv4 address block is whitelisted so we can do searches without logging in per-user. Recently we had a complaint from SAE about unusual activity on our account. Their logs show downloads of some papers all from January 1994, from one of our laptops and also from an address from China Mobile. At the time in question, our network logs show a connection from the China Mobile address to the laptop - apparently a Web proxy on port 9064. So it looks like there is something on our laptop that allows a remote user to download journal papers using our subscription. When I look on the laptop, I can't find it. The laptop was rebooted, but I had expected something like Squid to start up again. There seem to be no common ports open. I'd half expected something simple installed by a user - VNC or logmein - but I don't see that. It's an older machine running XP with a few "possibly harmless" adwares, a couple of which I've cleared out. Has anyone seen anything like this ? I read things in the media about industrial espionage from China, so I'm half thinking "APT", but on the other hand it may be a wild goose chase. I'm running malwarebytes, which has turned up a few "potentially unwanted programs" but nothing really obvious. My usual Linux technique of looking for changed files is stymied because the users installed a lot of legitimate programs right around the same time - LabView etc. -- Andrew Daviel, TRIUMF, Canada Tel. +1 (604) 222-7376 (Pacific Time) Network Security Manager
Current thread:
- Proxy stealing journal access Andrew Daviel (Oct 06)
- Re: Proxy stealing journal access Keller, Alex (Oct 06)
- Re: Proxy stealing journal access Fulton, Lora (Oct 07)
- Re: Proxy stealing journal access Rajewski, Jonathan (Oct 07)
- Re: Proxy stealing journal access Roger A Safian (Oct 07)
- Re: Proxy stealing journal access Gary Warner (Oct 07)
- Re: Proxy stealing journal access Tim Doty (Oct 07)
- Re: Proxy stealing journal access Keller, Alex (Oct 06)