NEWS Over the weekend of 11–12 February, 26 Swedish universities were subjected to denial of service attacks attempting to overload their systems. Umeå University’s website umu.se, including the student website, was one of the selected targets. Thanks to countermeasures in place, the problems could be averted quickly.
Illustrerar intrång i dator.
Imagelllustration: Ida ÅbergAs a common trait, the denial of service attacks that took place over the weekend were aimed at 26 universities’ external websites, in our case umu.se, which is also home to the student website.
A denial of service attack, also referred to as a DoS attack, is when a hacker uses a large number of computers to overload a certain website. The ultimate objective is to render a service as inaccessible as possible. As a consequence, users may experience the website as slow, and sometimes may not be able to access it at all. A denial of service attack does not result in any loss of data, and does not mean that data is breached.
Umeå University has a countermeasure in place to cope with this type of attack which makes us as resilient as we possibly can be. When an attack is discovered, the countermeasure means that we can rapidly switch to another version of umu.se better kitted to handle this type of problem.
When the attack was discovered, the University’s IT security team at the ICT Services and System Development immediately put in countermeasures to secure access to umu.se. And after 24 hours, they were able to switch back to the original version. Umu.se and the student website is now fully up and running as normal again. The filters that were activated to protect the website against access for foreign IP addresses were removed on Monday, 13 February. Given the circumstances, the University’s IT security team together with the Swedish University Computer Network has also increased surveillance and will take measures if further issues should arise.