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This article is more than 1 year old

Password reset warrior arrested for popping 1050 student accounts

And once he was in, this creep searched for sexy emails

An Arizona man has been arrested for hacking 1050 email accounts at two united States universities, plus attempts to do so at some 75 other educational institutions.

Jonathan Powell, 29, is alleged to have used password reset features to change logins for some 1050 accounts at the universities before breaching connected social media accounts for the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn and Google.

Reuters reports Powell searched email accounts for embarassing content using keywords 'horny' and 'naked'.

New York's Pace University contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation after finding password change attempts for 2054 accounts since October last year.

The hacker is alleged to have changed passwords for 15 accounts held by Pennsylvania University from some 220 attempts.

The university has taken down its password reset page as of the time of writing.

It is unknown if Pace University's login system had some form of security vulnerability that afforded the exceptionally high near 50 percent password reset hit rate. Ordinary brute force password guessing would yield a vastly higher ratio of password attempts to successful resets, well exceeding Powell's alleged success.

His alleged 2054 password attempts should have set off a variety of alarms at the university which appear to have been absent or unmonitored. ®

 

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