HALIFAX, N.S. — Information Technology Services is the department at Dalhousie University responsible for providing essential university technology staples, such as email, wireless networks and the academic timetable website forsaken by God. While the department is often overlooked, for the past two weeks it’s been making headlines for what’s being dubbed “Outlookgate.”
On Nov. 19 at 3:30 a.m., Trenton M. Hardbyte, the newly hired chief information security officer, issued an update to all Dalhousie-issued Microsoft accounts. This update effectively removed the requirement to enter a password and complete two-factor authentication to access an @dal.ca account. While many internal flags were raised, Hardbyte quickly removed all alerts sent to his fellow ITS members remotely, before sending an anonymous email to all registered addresses informing users of the exploit.
Since all that was needed to log in to any Dal account was now just an email address, this started a massive outbreak of students spying on faculty and vice versa. Students were eager to discover internal memos and documents listing the contingency plans faculty had during the recent labour dispute, as older professors attempted to discover how to migrate their OnlyFans subscriptions to a different email address.
Some information was discovered early on, such as how Kim Brooks really hates it when you compare her to the Quaker Oats mascot and several cheating (albeit mostly academic) scandals were exposed within the first 12 hours.
The exploit was ongoing for two days before an official patch from Microsoft was issued to fix the problem. Many websites are still hosting the Teams message logs scraped from users, but they’re being taken down one by one.
While there’s still some evidence to suggest that Dal’s board of governors ritualistically slaughters an engineering student every new year, the overall commotion from this incident has largely died down. Student and professor life have largely returned to normal, with a lot of students moving on to the next big crisis of adult life.
If this same course of events happened 20 years ago, when people practically lived in their inboxes, a lot more feathers would’ve been ruffled. However, this event ended up being fairly harmless. Mass invasions of privacy are fairly normal, and emails are only used by people over the age of 40. Apathy wins again.
By Jake Waldner