New students and their families move into campus housing at the University of California, Irvine, carrying bags and suitcases, Friday, Sept. 22, 2023, in Irvine. (Photo credit: Mark Rightmire of Orange County Register/SCNG)
Hackers last week attacked an online Discord group used by UC Irvine students, instructors, and alumni, posting gory videos of human and animal mutilation that sent some viewers to the hospital and sent them to the hospital. It reportedly caused a lot of “vomiting and tears.”
The cyberattack exposed around 3,000 users to disturbing images, and student managers of the university’s Discord group blocked the hackers.
“Some of the things I’ve seen just can’t be overlooked,” said Alina Kim, coordinator of a student-run online community at the University of California, Irvine, who helped manage the response. Told. She said: “Reports have shown that some people have been hospitalized with vomiting, panic attacks and traumatic reactions. This has a real psychological impact.”
Kim said the hackers had been identified, but their identities were not made public because they were believed to be for publicity purposes. She said the attackers demanded a $1,000 ransom to prevent her from posting videos for the next month, but the amount was so low that she thought they were joking.
Kim said she is contacting federal authorities because of the violent nature of the video and the ransom demand. Campus police are also investigating.
Discord is an online instant messaging social platform that uses voice calls, video calls, text messaging, and more. Communication can be private or group. In addition to being used for social purposes, students and faculty often rely on groups to communicate about course assignments. UC Irvine does not control Discord groups or the people who use them, said spokesman Tom Vasich.
“However, we take seriously our commitment to protecting our community members,” Vasic said in an email. “The university offers Information security training and resourcesWe also encourage community members to engage in cyber hygiene best practices, such as using strong passwords and being aware of phishing attacks aimed at harvesting sensitive credentials. ”
The university is also offering mental health counseling to victims of what students are calling the “Gore attack” on a campus Discord group.
At 9 p.m. on January 9, Kim said, hackers began flooding a large UC Irvine-affiliated Discord channel with “very disturbing gore.” Kim and his colleagues were able to quickly track down the perpetrator, who had bragged online about attacking another West Coast university in October.
All told, the hackers broke into about 30 of UC Irvine’s 500 Discord groups, which the attackers shut down in four days. Schools affected include mathematics, computer science and bioengineering.
The perpetrators appear to have gained entry through the group’s “open access” feature. Kim said all they needed was an invitation or a verified school email or phone account.
She said some groups were taken completely offline as a precaution and some were reestablished, but many important communications were lost. Students can use these sites to take classes and obtain information about their studies.
When the cyberattack occurred, Kim reached out to leaders of UC Irvine’s other large online communities and established a private Discord group to coordinate their efforts. Because they shared the attacker’s user ID, they could ban the attacker individually from the group.
Kim said biomedical engineering student Viet Bao Tran developed a Discord bot that can automatically ban hackers across groups within 24 hours.
Kim and her group eventually infiltrated the hacker’s Discord group and used a program to quickly obtain the user IDs of everyone involved in the attack. The University of California, Irvine group used a bot to automatically ban all 400 of its users.