An unknown hacker has been cracking into the Iowa State meteorology department’s computer networks in recent months.

Doug Yarger, professor of geological and atmospheric sciences, said the hacker has twice infiltrated the weather tracking systems the meteorology department uses to track real-time weather patterns.

The Department of Public Safety has become involved with the case and is treating the hacking as a crime.

“We’ve got a group that’s working on that,” said Loras Jaeger, director of DPS. “It’s headed up by [Associate Director of DPS] Jerry Stewart and has people from the computer engineering department and from legal services.”

Jaeger said the case is on the back burner for now until Stewart returns from a business trip, but DPS will be taking an active role in the investigation.

Yarger said the first attack occurred shortly after Dec. 25 and was discovered after one of the network servers began to behave strangely.

“One of our servers had some serious problems,” he said. “The hacker hit two systems, one a regular PC network and one a Silicon Graphics network, about the same time.”

Yarger said the passwords that allowed the system operators for the meteorology department to maintain their networks were changed. The only solution was to completely overhaul the system.

“The way these hackers work is they go in and change the root directory and the administrator passwords, and then we can’t get in,” Yarger said. “We had to start from scratch and reinstall the operating systems in all of our servers.”

But the hacker did not let up after the first attack. He or she continuously tried to re-gain access to the network after the operating systems were changed and did so soon after the network was re-established.

“He tried over and over and finally got in and just completely trashed the network,” Yarger said. “We tried to make sure they couldn’t get in as best as we could, but it didn’t matter.”

Since the first two attacks, Yarger said, the hacker has tried unsuccessfully to get back onto the network. However, he said the meteorology department does have a tough job ahead.

“Now the job is to install all new operating systems in all the workstations we use,” he said. “We’ve had to buy additional equipment to handle the new software, and we’ve had to learn a lot. This has really forced us to come up to speed with our computer knowledge.”

Several ISU faculty members who had experience in this area had to help the department learn, Yarger said.

“You kind of just look around and find out who can help,” he said. “There’s no campus computer protection unit, so to speak.”

Yarger also said the department believed the perpetrator was not an ISU student because of the remote locations the attacks came from.

“One of our individuals has kind of watched the traffic at night,” Yarger said, “and he’s been able to trace some of the things coming in from way off campus.”