University network slows to a crawl due to… seafood?

Feb13

by Sindy Cator on February 13, 2017 at 6:09 pm

Accessing the internet became a trial today for some university students. The culprit? Seafood and weak passwords. Verizon’s 2017 Data Breach Digest tells the story in a sneak peek released today. It sounds both too weird to be real, and too bizarre to be fake. A member of the IT Security Team at an unnamed university noticed a number of previously-dismissed complaints about slow or nonexistent internet connectivity. Looking more closely, they found the name servers were accessing thousands of seafood-related sub-domains. This fishy activity was so burdensome it blocked legitimate queries from actual students. Correctly assessing that nobody likes…