So. That happened.

[branchandroot]

It is the first day of classes for my university. The start of a new year! The day of greatest possible stress, for much of the faculty, staff, and student body!

So of course, we had a severe cybersecurity attack last night and central IT disconnected the entire campus computer system.

Today there is no network, wired or wireless, on campus. The websites are all down. The cloud services are all down, because our single sign-on authentication system is housed on campus. There are no rosters. There are no maps. There is no email unless you already had an active session going, and also cel service. There is no logging in to any campus computer (see again, re SSO).

On the first day of Fall classes. Which have gone forward any old how.

Only one of my teams can actually do anything about this, and I will be acquiring swag for them in thanks for manning the desk with locally downloaded PDFs of the class schedule so they can look up class locations for students who walk in. Or, in all likelihood, stagger in wild-eyed with panic.

So how was your Monday?

Comments

[azurelunatic]

I am so sorry.

[branchandroot]

Lots of deep breathing, here.

[rthstewart]

WOW. I hope you see the other side of this very very soon. WOW

[branchandroot]

It's wild. We've got feds in on this, investigating compromised "high privilege" accounts, so who knows where it's going to go.

[azurelunatic]

omg

When old-work had an Incident, there was eventually a Great Swap of all the RSA tokens. Of course, the Great Swap started happening before anyone outside IT silos was told what was going on. This gave rise to all sorts of speculation and mockery in the social parts of the network that were still up. Echoing the Please Bring Your RSA Token To This Conference Room, For Security Reasons, In Alphabetical Order notice that was going out, someone requested on fun-list that people bring baked goods to his office...

And that's how the technical gripes and pastry appreciation IRC channel became known as #cupcake.

[branchandroot]

[cackles] That's great!

[trobadora]

OMG! So many hugs.

[branchandroot]

Thank you!

[umadoshi]

O_O Well, that's completely horrifying. I hope it gets straightened out ASAP and that the aftermath is as minimally awful as possible.

[branchandroot]

It is 110% horrifying, and it's only getting moreso. We may have network back by the end of the week, but that depends on whether the investigation actually nails down what was compromised. Meanwhile, it's local storage for everything.

[starandrea]

That genuinely sounds like "natural disaster" level of catastrophe, worthy of cancelling the day O.O

[branchandroot]

You would think! And yet, no, we're wallowing through what looks like all of week one with no network, very much like a herd of dinosaurs through a tar pit. Whee.

[schneefink]

Wow, that sounds absolutely miserable. Fingers crossed it gets fixed quickly.

[branchandroot]

It's nuts. I have every extremity I have crossed, at this point!

[momijizukamori]

god that is like a 'y'know what I'm just going to vanish for a week' time, though no doubt you'd end up with even more to come back to.

[branchandroot]

I wish!

[ursamajor]

Hoooooly spit, I saw this news earlier this week, and was like "wait, WHAT, the *entire-ass campus is down*? ... wait, *all* campuses in the system are down? in the first week of classes?!" I am so very glad to not be in IT any longer, and watching the recovery plan in action from afar is fascinating. I'm sorry you're caught in the middle of it!

[branchandroot]

That was a wild first three days of term, for sure.

Though I'm entertained to observe that the top question to come in to 2nd floor Modern Languages Building was from students who were in the right building, on the right floor, and just couldn't find bloody 2011, the room that's totally out of sequence and has no signage, and that we /always/ have poor studentlings knocking on the door the first week of class, trying to find.

[tinny]

Muahahahah omg the poor Freshmen! O_O

[branchandroot]

Right? Like, welcome to your new home for four years.

[superborb]

I suppose they had timed the attack to cause maximum disruption, and by god they chose the day for that o_o

[branchandroot]

Best guess from outside the actual investigation is that they were after high-security research data, so I'm pretty sure they counted on everyone being distracted, and also unwilling to crash the whole campus on the first day of class. Joke's on them! The aftermath is just a pain to clean up.