A hacker known by the nickname Exfocus has resumed the DDoS attack, targeting Rutgers University in New Jersey, America, after previously carrying out four other attacks between March and May of this year.
In previous attacks, various parts of the university's IT infrastructure had periodically gone down, culminating in a 5-day period between late April and early May when the university's access to the Internet was completely offline.
During this period, students were unable to use credit cards on the University premises, nor the Sakai and eCollege LMS (Learning Management System) applications.
According to an interview the hacker gave to Dimitry Apollonsky, a client asked him to attack Rutgers and paid him a sum of Bitcoin for his services. In the same interview, the hacker revealed that he had a botnet of over 85,000 machines capable of launching attacks of around 25 Gbps.
While recent DDoS attacks can easily reach over 100 Gbps, the Exfocus attack, even if it was only 25 Gbps, was powerful enough to convince the university administration to spend $3 million (€2.67 million) over the summer to upgrade its security measures. Some sources claim that this additional expense will cause a 2.3% increase in student tuition.
Despite all the exorbitant expense, the latest DDOS attack seems to have had no problem getting through and knocking out internet and WiFi access for the entire university.
In a message on its official Facebook page, a Rutgers spokesperson said:
“Since then, we have made significant and substantial upgrades to our network hardware, which utilizes DDOS mitigation services, Web server improvements have been made, and we have switched providers to new ones that provide additional deterrent capabilities to DDoS threats.”
In the aforementioned interview with Apollonsky, Exfocus said:
“I hope the university signs up with a provider that has DDoS mitigation capabilities. I get paid extra if that happens.”
