University of Sunderland experience long-term outage after cyber attack

On Wednesday 13^th of October 2021, the University of Sunderland in the UK announced they were experience IT issues that had led to most of their IT systems being taken down. The university stated the IT issues all indicated that they were experiencing a cyber-attack.

The first signs of the incident were seen on Tuesday morning but weren’t investigated straight away as they were seen to be not serious by university. But by Wednesday, all telephone lines, the official website, the main email servers, library Wi-Fi, on-premises PC/laptop access, printing, and all online portals were taken down and eventually an alternative domain had to be set up to keep student updated on the situation.

Although the University of Sunderland hasn’t stated the incident to be a ransomware attack, there is a high possibly of it being a ransomware attack as it is known that ransomware groups have targeted large educational institutes with the belief, they are more likely to pay the ransom.