Several education networks in Brabant and Limburg were hit by a DDoS attack on Thursday. The affected institutions suffer from a slow connection or even no connection at all. This is reported by SURF, a partnership of Dutch educational and research institutions in the field of ICT. According to SURF, institutions outside Brabant and Limburg that are on their network may also experience inconvenience due to the large amount of traffic.
During a DDoS attack, a server is overloaded with data traffic. This causes the server to become overloaded. This happens regularly. SURF was also hit by a DDoS attack on Wednesday, making the Tilburg university inaccessible for hours. DigiD, a system that allows citizens to log in to all kinds of government agencies, was also hit by a DDoS attack on Wednesday. Government agencies deal with these attacks every day.
At TU Eindhoven, the entire network was taken offline after hackers tried to attack computer systems last weekend. The university hopes to resume education on Monday. It is unclear who is behind both the DDoS attacks and the hack at TU Eindhoven.