Kieper: Campus responds to large-scale network attack


David Kieper, UW-Green Bay’s interim chief information officer, shares the following:

“The campus network suffered an outage on Tuesday, April 7, 2015 between 5:30 pm and 7:30 pm. The campus network was the target of a large-scale distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack that was initiated by an unknown party. This attack resulted in a large amount of bogus traffic being sent from the Internet into the campus network. The traffic levels were approximately ten times the normal peak for our campus network traffic. This amount of traffic was sufficient to overload our network connection to the Internet as well as the network firewall devices that filter traffic between the Internet and campus. The overload caused major issues with Internet connectivity to and from campus, flow of email to and from campus, and with connectivity between campus clients and servers. Persons using both wired and wireless connections on campus were affected. In the aftermath of the event, Information Services staff have investigated and made changes to the campus firewall devices to try to reduce the impact of future denial of service attacks. However, all networks are vulnerable to this type of attack. Unfortunately, the overall frequency of these attacks is on the rise across the world. We apologize for any inconvenience that may have occurred as a result of this network outage.”