Sunderland University suffers 'extensive IT disruption' after cyber attack

Online teaching, website and email severely affected in what appears to be the latest cyber attack on higher education

The University of Sunderland has been hit by a serious cyber attack.

Beginning on Tuesday night, the attack took down a number of essential services and left some students unable to access email. Online teaching remains severely disrupted and the university's website was still down at the time of writing.

In a statement a university spokesperson said: "The University continues to experience extensive IT disruption issues believed to have been caused by a cyber-attack.

"The University is now working with a number of agencies, including the police, to find out what exactly has happened and the extent of the problems."

The spokesman encouraged students to attend face-to-face lectures on campus, while plans were in place to support those studying further afield.

The nature of the suspected cyber incident has not been made public, but there have been a string of ransomware attacks on colleges and universities over the last 18 months, including in neighbouring Newcastle where the Universities of Newcastle and Northumbria were hit in autumn 2020 by the DoppelPaymer ransomware gang.

Other higher education facilities affected in the past year include South and City College in Birmingham, the University of Northampton and the University of Hertfordshire, and the National University of Ireland Galway was attacked in October.

Furthermore, nearly 20 UK-based universities and charities were hit in a global ransomware attack in 2020 which targeted US-based cloud computing provider Blackbaud.

Higher education institutions have become a key focus for ransomware gangs as they hold sensitive data from research activities and a mass of personal records, and also because any disruption will be immediately visible. Opening up after lockdown coincided in a spike in the number of attacks.

In June the NCSC updated its alert for higher educational institutions, saying it was "investigating another increase in ransomware attacks against schools, colleges and universities in the UK."

Commenting on the news, Danny Lopez, CEO of security vendor Glasswall Solutions, said: "Educational institutions should adopt a ‘defence-in-depth' approach to cybersecurity, as advised by the NCSC.

"This means using multiple layers of defence with several mitigations, which creates more opportunities to detect malware and prevent it from doing widespread harm to the institution. But even when all procedures and policies are well-executed, there's no escaping the fact that adversaries are constantly looking to probe vulnerabilities."