Cal State Long Beach Information Technology Services (ITS) is investigating an apparent attack that caused an outage in Internet service on campus Monday morning.
ITS management sent an e-mail to faculty and staff on Monday reporting that the Internet was inaccessible or slow throughout campus from 9:24-10:15 a.m.
Once campus Internet access began running normally, ITS reported in the e-mail that the outage may have been due to either an attack on the university’s network or a test on emergency generator equipment. The cause is still under investigation.
“We’re still gathering data, but it appears there was an attack,” said Bryon Jackson, director of ITS telecommunications and resource management.
Jackson said the attack could be a denial of service attack coming from China. Such an attack is when someone sends a lot of traffic one way, causing a security system to slow down or come to a standstill.
Steve La, director of ITS network services, said the network is secure, and that the security device CSULB used to fight off the attack caused the temporary Internet outage.
“[They] are common and happen everywhere,” La said about denial of services attacks. “If you don’t apply security, [hackers] can use your computer to attack others. Last year, we intercepted over 1.3 million attacks including denial of service attacks. We are confident that users are protected and safe.”
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