Video: What might every college IT official dread?

... Possibly a hacker who breaks into your system and publicly makes you look like a fool.

A prankster did that Nov. 5 at Washington State University -- infiltrating the campus media system and effectively taking part of it over. They guy then forced the system to broadcast his video about campus squirrels (?), at the end of which he chided university IT officials for building a system that he could so easily break into.

The Chronicle of Higher Education elaborates:

Students and instructors arriving for class on Friday morning were greeted by a video message automatically beamed onto projector screens in more than two dozen classrooms. The message was delivered by a hacker dressed up as V, the Guy Fawkes-inspired anti-hero of  the 2006 movie V for Vendetta. After hacking into the university’s academic media system, which manages classroom-presentation and distance-learning technology, the as-of-yet-unidentified culprit or culprits programmed motorized screens to unfurl themselves and scheduled projectors to broadcast the five-minute-long video once every hour. The video—ostensibly a diatribe against campus squirrels and a call to end student apathy—interrupted lectures and cut off access for distance-learning students until the IT staff was able to shut down the program in the early afternoon.

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