Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are designed to disrupt targeted systems by flooding them with superfluous traffic. They come from all over the world, last from minutes to hours, and affect all industries. While they can be highly disruptive, they typically do not represent a security breach.
When University systems are targeted, campus IT services are running but appear inaccessible due to the high volume of traffic on the network. As a result, some services may be interrupted or unavailable until the attack is mitigated.
ITS has strategies for responding to attacks and minimizing their disruption. Unfortunately, some downtime is often unavoidable. Information regarding the availability of campus IT services is always posted on our Systems Status and Scheduled Maintenance page.