A hacker may have caused the University of Memphis online network to temporarily shutdown on Tuesday. Ellen Watson, the vice provost of information technology services, explained what happened to the U of M’s network.
“What happened today was that a PC on the network suffered a ‘denial of service attack,’” Watson said. “One computer got infected due to a vulnerability and a hacker caused that machine to launch an enormous quantity of network activity.”
Watson explained exactly how it is possible for a hacker to potentially gain access to a school network, such the one ITS monitors at the University of Memphis, and how exactly they handled the situation.
“Every so often somebody puts in a drive that may contain a virus or a backdoor to the network, which can find and exploit its vulnerability,” Watson said. “At 12:33 p.m., a single computer overloaded the network to the point where no connection could be made, and by 12:59 p.m. we resolved it. As soon as we identified the PC that was the problem and took it off of the network, everything went back to normal.”
On a day-to-day basis, Jasmin Allouzi, a University student, travels from location to location until she can find a computer with quality Internet connection. She said it was no different on Tuesday.
“It kept going on and off during my quizzes,” Allouzi said. “It’s usually really slow anyway, but I’ve found it’s better in different places on campus. It’s way better in the Library.”
Watson said that defending the University’s online network is a top priority for ITS. Hackers pose a continuous threat, according to Watson, and it is Information Technology Service’s job to stop potential problems from occurring — and to quickly eliminate them as soon as they are discovered.
“There are whole groups of hacker communities that are constantly looking to get through holes in systems to access data on networks,” Watson said. “Our network is constantly getting attacked and we are constantly defending the network. We block from the outside coming in. Our primary focus is keeping problems from happening, not clean up after the fact. If something really terrible happened we would contact the FBI.”
Watson said that while this specific incident may have involved a hacker, other campus internet problems are more cut-and-dry. Watson urged students to contact the ITS helpdesk if they had any problems with the University’s internet.
“My suspicion is that when people complain about spotty Internet, their device is not connecting well to the wireless Internet,” Watson said. “If a connection is slow, students can call the helpdesk and report what problems their having with connectivity. We will make an analysis and if it is within the budget we will upgrade the wireless Internet in that area.”
