The University of Sunderland in the United Kingdomhas announced widespread operational issues that have brought down most of its IT systems, attributing the problem to a cyberattack.
See also: Ransomware attack forces Howard University to cancel classes
The first signs of disruption in the university's IT systems appeared on Tuesday morning, but so far they remain largely unresolved.
The attack appears to have knocked out all phone lines, the official website, main email servers, library WiFi, computer/laptop access, printing, and all online portals that students use to access eBooks, magazines, and other services.
Unfortunately, there is no estimate on when the systems will be back up and running, as the attack appears to still be in the containment phase.
Students are advised to monitor the university's social media channels to stay updated on the situation.
An alternative domain, “ uostoday.sunderland.ac.uk ” , has also been created to provide some updates to interested students, but it will not offer any other services.
See also: University of Colorado: Hackers demand ransom to prevent the leak of over 300,000 files
The University of Sunderland is a public research institute with around 20,000 students, so the disruption from the cyberattack affects a significant number of people.
As expected, this incident has affected some students at a critical point in their studies, with some of them facing deadlines for assignments or applications.
Although the University of Sunderland did not report a ransomware attack, the extensive outage caused to its systems makes this scenario a likely one.
There have been a number of ransomware attacks on universities in the past year, with some notable examples including the attacks on TU Dublin and Newcastle University.
A national survey conducted in 2020 revealed that around 25% of all universities in the UK have suffered a ransomware attack at least once since 2013.
See also: University of Texas at El Paso: Hackers targeted the University
Malicious actors target large educational institutions because they believe they are good candidates to quickly pay the ransom they are asking for in order to get their systems working again.
In most cases, however, we see that these entities prefer to restore from backups and accept any data leaks that may have occurred during the cyberattack as an inevitable consequence.
