Another cyber attack against higher education contained

This is the third day in a row that universities and universities of applied sciences in the Netherlands faced a DDoS attack. A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is designed to force a website, computer, or online service offline. This is accomplished by flooding the target with many requests, consuming its capacity and rendering it unable to respond to legitimate requests.

"It just stopped," said SURF spokesman Tom Hoven just before noon. "The traffic has started up again. Our measures worked, but we will dedicate this weekend to understanding what happened exactly, so we can draw lessons from it."

Daily attacks
Hoven says that SURF's network is attacked in this way almost daily. "Normally, we beat these attacks off and nobody notices anything, but this one was a lot bigger. All our members were affected."

SURF is the ICT cooperative of Dutch education and research institutions. All universities, universities of applied sciences and teaching hospitals are members, as are vocational institutions and some high schools.
 
SURF can't say much about the origin or motive of the attack. The cooperative will not disclose what measures have been taken, either. After all, another attack could follow.

Several higher education institutions, including UU, have been suffering from slow Internet connections due to attacks against institutions in the south of the Netherlands. Today's attack led to fewer problems in Utrecht than yesterday's, a spokesperson said. UU will not comment on the additional security measures it is taking. "We are even more alert following the incidents at TU Eindhoven and Fontys University of Applied Sciences," he said.

Specifically targeting network
Hoven, from SURF, explains that DDoS attacks are targeted, unlike most phishing e-mails (fake messages about an inheritance or login problems at your bank, for example). The attackers choose a network to overload.

TU Eindhoven suffered a cyber attack last weekend. The university had to shut down its network as a precaution. The systems have since been restarted and teaching will resume on Monday. It is now known whether the DDoS attack is related to this hacking attempt.

The Dutch cabinet is working on a bill to improve cyber security. The new law might include higher education institutions, obliging them to take certain measures.