Hunters Hacked

10:30 AM -- BOZEMAN, Mont. -- A hacker in search of quick storage space broke into a database containing information about hunters and their booty, the Bozeman Daily Chronicle reports. The Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks (FWP) department told the paper that a "hunter-harvest survey" stored on a local university computer was hacked in May.

Seems the cyber-poachers were seeking temporary storage for pirated software, a state expert told the paper. The FWP server, having no firewall, was easy pickings.

The survey contained 12 Gbytes of personal information about hunters, including their Social Security numbers and data on game they had killed. According to Ron Aasheim, a spokesman for FWP, there were 785,000 records involved.

The FWP sets quotas on the number of moose, bighorn sheep, mountain goat, and mountain lions an individual can hunt in season.

Luckily, no personal data appears to have been bagged. FWP's Aasheim says the systems have already been moved to new state servers, where storage is more secure. "We dodged a bullet, that's the good news," he told the Chronicle.Too bad the moose can't say the same thing.

Figure 1: Bull moose swimming. Source: FWP

Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch