Cyber attack brings university internet connections down

Campuses, fire services and some council offices across the United Kingdom were affected by the attack which pulled down all Janet-operated sites listed as.ac.uk and.gov.uk domains, Janet’s own website, as well as the worldwide higher education Wi-Fi roaming service eduroam.

The attacks were very well documented by UK’s JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee).

Janet first came under a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack yesterday, and the same attack has continued through to today forcing much of the academic community offline.

“By flooding the service with excessive network traffic, an attacker is attempting to exceed the capacity of the service, which causes the service to run slowly or become unavailable”, the university said. “Customers affected have been contacted and are being provided with up-to-date information via alternative channels”, it said.

Despite the disruption, Jisc said today that “blocks which have been put in place to stop the attacks are working effectively”.

Last night they were still trying to deal with the problems, but said: “We understand the importance of connectivity to colleges, universities and other public sector organisations”.

A spokeswoman said: We would like to apologise for internet and computer issues that have been experienced across the day.

For those who find Janet’s DNS services sluggish to respond, it may be possible to work around the issue by switching to Google Europe’s DNS. According to the incident timeline on the JISC Twitter account, the network’s administrators were able to fend off attacks in initial phases and even mount defensive countermeasures.

It added staff and students were experiencing problems with accessing external websites, email, submitting assessments online and external collaboration services for research staff.

The attack is thought to have started on Monday 7 December and was reported by student newspaper the Mancunian.

However, no-one has yet claimed responsibility for the cyber attack.

A DDoS attack is when an online service is brought down or interrupted by being overwhelmed by traffic from multiple sources.

“Why do hackers use DDoS, it may be to cover another attack?” he said.