Anyone that has been on campus today will most likely have noticed that the RHUL CampusNet wifi has been particularly temperamental, with certain web pages not loading, for instance, TurnItIn. Obviously this is a massive inconvenience, especially during the most chaotic week of term with many students having had deadlines earlier on in the day.
But this isn’t an issue specific to RoHo and rather is affecting most universities across the country because the network – JANET – has been down following, what is suspected to be, a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) cyber attack.
DDoS attacks work by created fake traffic to a webpage causing it to become overwhelmed, which in turn, slows it down and makes it inaccessible. So whilst Moodle, Campus Connect and RHUL emails are working normally, anything that is hosted outside of the university, like the vast majority of web pages, is likely to experience issues. The attack began yesterday and has persisted throughout the day today with more and more universities being affected.
Whilst the internet now seems to be back up and running fairly well, there’s no telling if it will experience another attack later on. The IT services help desk have said that internet services may still be “at-risk”.