n late November 2022, a few days after ETH Alumni launched their new feature “Who is who” which allows them to look up and connect to other members, I came across a severe access control vulnerability. Without any authorization over the internet, it allowed extracting at least 35418 member profiles, including full name, postal address, nationality, title, graduation field, study start year, gender, profile picture and hashed passwords.

The University of Zurich is currently the target of a serious cyberattack. The perpetrators appear to be acting in a very professional manner and are part of a current accumulation of attacks on educational and health institutions. Several attacks have been carried out on universities in German-speaking countries in recent weeks, resulting in suspension of their IT services for extended periods of time. The attacks are usually carried out by compromising several individual accounts and systems.