IEEE says proxy "anomaly" caused 100k password breach
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) said an issue that arose in conjunction with its proxy server provider is to blame for a breach in which the usernames and passwords of about 100,000 members were exposed to a researcher.
In a statement released Thursday, IEEE, one of the world's largest technology professional organizations, apologized for the incident, which was brought to light by Radu Dragusin, a computer science researcher at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Last week, he visited IEEE's FTP site, hoping to discover articles the group publishes, but instead found something far more alarming: the clear-text usernames and passwords of roughly 100,000 members from around the world.
Dragusin has said that he opened a number of ZIP log files -- 100 gigabytes in total -- inside a folder labeled "Akamai," a company that IEEE uses for content delivery. The files chronicled whenever a member entered their username and password on the IEEE site, meaning they contained, among other things, the credentials, IP addresses and HTTP requests of the visitors. He estimates this information was publicly available for at least a month.
