Universities affected by malicious internet attack

Universities in the United Kingdom, including Warwick, suffered a cyber-attack which forced internet connections to go down.

This attack happened on Monday night and continued on to Tuesday morning and meant that eduroam, a service used by many universities, experienced difficulties.

The provider for eduroam, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), suffered distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) which meant that university websites had to be shut down.

Their official website stated: “The blocks which have been put in place to stop the attacks are working effectively and there has been no impact to customers since Tuesday at 14:00, despite further attacks being attempted.”

This caused problems for Warwick students as Tabula was impacted. This meant that students could not submit assessed work online. Many students expressed concerns about possible late submission penalties as a result.

The director of press and policy at the university, Peter Dunn, informed the Boar: “Departments will of course apply common sense when dealing with enquiries from students whose deadlines may have been genuinely affected by any system outages.”

The English Department was aware of the problems and emailed its students with a 12pm deadline on Tuesday: “No one will be penalised due to late submission due to this issue.” They sent a follow-up email explaining that 6pm would be their official deadline for the day.

It has now been confirmed that any deadlines that fell on that day will be given a one day extension if the network outage could have had an impact on students ability to prepare work. If there is a deadline that falls between the 8 and the 31 of December, the university will grant an extra working day to make up for lost time. Specific departments will need to be contacted for clarification.

Jasmine Lam, a first-year law student, commented: “I didn’t know it was an attack; I just thought the wifi was down – as it usually is.”

If anyone was affected by this and would like advice, please get in touch with the education officer, Charlie Hindhaugh, at education@warwicksu.com