Tag Archive for: university

Hack disrupts Southern Arkansas University communications | Colleges & Universities

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Southern Arkansas University is recovering from an attack against its computer servers.

A statement said SAU is responding to a security incident that disrupted access to university systems and applications.

“While access to some systems remain offline, access to faculty, staff, and student email and the Blackboard learning management system are operational.

“SAU is working with independent forensic specialists to investigate the situation and will take all appropriate actions in response to its findings,” the statement said.

“We have notified law enforcement and will continue to actively monitor our networks and take appropriate actions to protect our systems in line with our incident response protocols,” the statement said.

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University of Michigan shuts down internet due to security concern

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ANN ARBOR, Mich. – Internet service at the University of Michigan was cut off by the university after a cybersecurity threat was detected on Monday, the first day of fall classes for many students.

“We recognize that cutting off online services to our campus community on the eve of a new academic year is stressful and a major inconvenience. We sincerely apologize for the disruption this has caused. Our Information Assurance team, in partnership with leading cybersecurity service providers, detects, deflects, and mitigates a steady stream of malicious actors every hour of every day.

Sunday afternoon, after careful evaluation of a significant security concern, we made the intentional decision to sever our ties to the internet. We took this action to provide our information technology teams the space required to address the issue in the safest possible manner.”

—> System-wide power outage forces 5 schools in Ann Arbor to close

The university said it may be several days before all online services return to normal activity. Here’s some info they offered for students:

  • It appears that the impact is not the same across the university or on all campuses. All clinical applications at Michigan Medicine are functional and no patient care has been disrupted.

  • Classes are meeting on all three campuses. Faculty members will, to the best of their abilities, communicate directly with students directly regarding any needed adjustments. Please check ro.umich.edu/calendars/schedule-of-classes to view public course schedules and locations.

  • Campus leaders recognize that many students rely on U-M systems to access class information and navigate campus, especially on the first day of classes. Consideration will be given to students for impacts to class attendance or assignments that depend on U-M systems while our teams work to restore service.

  • Campus remains open. Residence halls, dining facilities, classroom buildings, and all university offices are operational. Individual units are making local decisions about where (on campus or remotely) employees are best able to fulfill their roles.

  • In recognition of the challenges faced during this outage, students will not incur late registration or…

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Southeastern Louisiana University Says Hackers Didn’t Get Personal Info

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(TNS) — Six months after Southeastern Louisiana University’s systems were taken offline in response to a cybersecurity attack, the school announced Thursday that no personal identifiable information or educational records were stolen in the incident.

Southeastern took its network offline Feb. 23 in response to the security incident, which left students and faculty without access to the school’s website, email or portal for submitting assignments for nearly four weeks while officials worked with Louisiana State Police to investigate the incident.

The school said in a statement it worked with the Division of Administration, Louisiana National Guard, LSP, FBI, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Secret Service and the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness during the investigative process.


“Investigations as complex as this take time, and it was important that the work was conducted with the highest level of diligence to ensure the most thorough and complete results possible,” the university wrote in its statement.

While neither Southeastern nor LSP have provided much detail about the incident, a cybersecurity expert with New Orleans and South East Information Technology Group, a Hammond-based cybersecurity firm, found 150 gigabytes of SELU data on the “dark web” in April, made available by a ransomware group named “BianLian.” The claim was also verified by sources at cybersecurity firm Postlethwaite & Netterville.

©2023 The Advocate, Baton Rouge, La. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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Congressman Cohen Announces Internet Privacy Research Grant to the University of Memphis

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Work on encrypted data over wide-area networks supported by the National Science Foundation

MEMPHIS – Congressman Steve Cohen (TN-9) today announced that the University of Memphis will receive a $220,133 grant from the National Science Foundation for research on privacy in the transmission of encrypted data over wide-area networks. The research is being conducted by Professor Christos Papadopoulos, who holds the Sparks Family Chair of Excellence in Global Research Leadership in the Department of Computer Science.

Congressman Cohen made the following statement:

“I congratulate the University and Professor Papadopoulos on this prestigious National Science Foundation grant award. Clearly, privacy concerns must be addressed as more personal data travels over the internet and I am pleased to see this innovative research addressing them is being undertaken at the University.”

According to the National Science Foundation abstract of the research:

“The PIMAWAT (Privacy in Internet Measurements Applied to WAN And Telematics) project will demonstrate new methods to provide data networking datasets that respect end-user privacy, while still being able to support new research in network protocols, security, privacy, and machine learning. The main insight is that *most data today sent over the wide-area network (WAN) is encrypted*; thus, the challenge is to demonstrate what data is encrypted, detect and scrub any remaining leaks, and finally anonymize the metadata (who talks to whom) before sharing data.

“The intellectual merit of PIMAWAT will be to develop new methods to anonymize network traffic at scale, then use those new algorithms to evaluate potential data leakage, and demonstrate that real-world data sources can be scrubbed for sharing while respecting privacy. PIMAWAT plans to focus the investigator’s prior work on wide-area network data traffic. As possible, it will also explore vehicle telematics as a recently developing dataset that poses unique privacy opportunities and challenges, with a device (not person) focus, yet with geolocation and application details.

“The broader impacts of PIMAWAT will be to democratize the potential to collect and share network data through…

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