Some unknown cyber criminals have attacked a publicly funded network “Janet” which was used by many universities throughout the United Kingdom.
On Monday morning, students from different universities began to face problem in accessing the network and soon it was discovered that the network has faced a DDoS attack which didn’t allow the student to get online.
Few of the leading Universities who reported the attack included Manchester, Edinburgh, Sussex, Glasgow and Royal Holloway.
Janet network provides wifi services and controls .ac.uk and .gov.uk email addresses, leading users of the network are the staff and students from all the universities in the country.
For the students, this time of the year is crucial as they want to complete their assignments and these disruptions are causing a lot of headaches, according to Mancunion.
IT departments are not sure about how much time network recovery can take, the Manchester IT department in a statement said:
“The Janet network is experiencing issues again this morning affecting a number of educational institutions including us. We’ll keep you updated. Engineers from Jisc are implementing blocks to prevent connections from the source of the attack while taking great care to ensure that legitimate network traffic is still accessible.”
So, far no one has taken responsibility of these attacks but students believe ISIS could be behind these attacks.
Express Newspaper reports that a UCL student, who requested privacy, said:
“The timing is dreadful – it makes you think that it was the work of a terrorist organization”. IS have the technology to pull off such a heinous act of cyber-crime, so maybe it was them. There is already a tonne of pressure on us without having a lack of access to the internet.”
Some of the targeted websites are back while some are still offline. Here are some Tweets showing student and online education service providers are discussing the updates:
A statement from Jisc on the Distributed Denial of Service attacks disrupting the Janet network: https://t.co/CyqyOYI3qI
— UoM IT Services (@UoM_ITS) December 8, 2015
Our website is back online – our statement on the DDoS attacks is at https://t.co/JIWPIy2H1C. Hope to have a further update later this AM.
— Jisc (@Jisc) December 9, 2015
Seems like it's the whole Janet network in the UK being affected today, we're waiting for more info and will keep you informed.
— UoM IT Services (@UoM_ITS) December 8, 2015
#TT169600 – Issues are continuing, we are continuing to work on a resolution.
— Jisc Major Incidents (@jiscmi) December 8, 2015
https://twitter.com/jesswalford/status/674250031894020096
Why would someone(s) DDOS JANET? Other than because they're arseholes.
— Mike (@6byNine) December 8, 2015
https://twitter.com/JosephTumaini/status/674186386258440193
https://twitter.com/SteveCooke/status/674166634622394368