The University of London Computer Centre (ULCC) was the subject of a cyber attack yesterday that may have left millions of students unable to access the organisation's IT services.
The centre provides services to over 300 UK institutions and supports over two million higher education and further education students on its open-source learning platform Moodle.
According to status updates, the centre updated students on the problems it was having throughout Thursday morning.
By 9am it said it had narrowed down the problem to a fault with its firewall. At 10am ULCC explained that it had reset core network switches and the firewalls to no avail. It said it was sending over an engineer from its firewall provider to the data centre to try to fix the issue.
At 11am it had called in engineers to work on fixing the networking problem that it believed was caused by issues with its firewall.
By 12pm, ULCC said that its services were up and running again and explained that the networking issue was caused by a cyber-attack. It said it had taken action to block the source.
Despite ULCC managing to get the system back up and running, George Anderson, director at Webroot, said that over four hours of ‘complete shutdown' was not an acceptable time-period in most cases.
He suggested that the attack was clearly implemented to have "maximum impact" on a system that would have been at peak usage around exam-time.
"Hopefully this case will serve as a warning to other organisations, encouraging them to ensure that they have an effective strategy in place to make sure user experience is impacted as little as possible," he said.
No comments:
Post a Comment