The digital attack on universities and colleges that started around half past eight on Thursday morning is over. The SURF organization reported this on Thursday afternoon. Around 4 p.m. it was reported that students and teachers were able to get connected again and that all services were working again.
SURF is the joint computer network of universities, colleges, secondary vocational education, academic hospitals and research institutes. The Máxima Medical Center in Eindhoven and Veldhoven, among others, is connected to the network and had problems due to the DDoS attack.
DDoS attack
DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service. In such an attack, computer servers are bombarded with large amounts of data, causing the servers to become clogged and no longer have room for normal internet traffic.
At the hospital, the attack mainly slowed down systems. “It is not so serious that patient care is at risk. Care continued as usual on Wednesday,” a hospital spokesperson said on Thursday morning.
At the Summa secondary vocational school in Eindhoven, the attack mainly caused ‘a lot of inconvenience’.
Measures taken
Several measures have been taken to prevent new attacks as much as possible. The organization does not want to say what kind of measures are involved. “Not to make potential attackers wiser than necessary,” says a SURF spokesperson.
SURF cannot give any guarantees that there will be no new attacks. On Thursday there was a DDoS attack for the second day in a row.
SURF says nothing about the attackers, their motive and the scale of the attack. “I can only say that it was very extensive. Our network is attacked almost daily, but this was on a quite different scale,” the spokesperson said. No report has yet been filed with the police.
Problems caused by digital attacks
DigiD, which allows you to log in to government systems, was also the target of a DDoS attack earlier this week. As a result, people were temporarily unable to log in to, among others, MijnOverheid, the National Road Transport Agency (RDW) and the Central Judicial Collection Agency.
Last weekend, Eindhoven University of Technology caught digital intruders in its systems. As a precaution, the network was immediately taken off the air. There appears to be no connection between all these digital attacks.
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The TU in Eindhoven took its network offline on Sunday after it became clear that hackers had penetrated