Rutgers Working With Police to Trace Hacker after Recent Cyber Attack

Nj.com published news on 29th September, 2015 quoting the campus administrator as saying "Rutgers University (New Jersey, US) officials are working with local police and the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) to catch attacker who crippled the computer network of the school earlier in the last week of September 2015."

The University was struck with a DDoS or distributed denial of service attack at around 10 a.m. on Monday, 28th September, 2015 which crashed websites of Rutgers and left almost 65,000 students of the university without Internet accessibility for most of the day.

Notably, a DDoS attack happens when a hacker gains control of thousands (or millions) of computers and aims them at a single server overpowering that network with traffic and eventually knocking it offline.

At least, this attack was the fifth one on Rutgers in less than a year.

Nj.com published news on 29th September, 2015 quoting Don Smith, Vice President of Rutger's Information Technology, as saying "You should know that we are working with state and federal law enforcement officials on this matter."

In the latest attack, a hacker used "bots" or compromised computers to flood networks of Rutgers with requests which paralyzed Rutger's Internet and Wi-Fi access and left public unable to visit most websites of the University.

Students complained on social media network that the outage also impacted Sakai and eCollege, tests and other communication and two online learning software tools employed to administer homework. An outage before limited the ability of the school in accepting credit cards.

It looks to be the first attack on the Rutgers University ever since it invested $3 million to protect its computers in a better manner after at least four assaults during the last year in the school. That upgrade was the main reason due to which Rutgers increased its tuition fees.

Nj.com published news on 29th September, 2015 stating that Smith apologized to students, faculty and staff members for the inconvenience caused to them due to "disrupting and annoying" attacks.

He concluded: "DDoS attacks are becoming more often in cyberspace; they are being experienced in higher education, commercial organisations and government and there is no doubt that they will happen again."

» SPAMfighter News - 10/7/2015