University confirms outages around the school impacting ‘devices, systems, and cloud-based services,’ but the hospital is not affected.
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Article by Steven Hale [The Nashville Banner, Creative Commons] –
Vanderbilt University officials said Monday evening that its information technology staff was continuing to work with government agencies and other partners to manage the fallout of a major cyberattack that shut down the school’s digital networks.
Although campus Wi-Fi had been restored, according to an update from the school, “access to most Vanderbilt systems and applications remains restricted.” Staff, faculty and students were told to return to work and class as scheduled on Tuesday.
Earlier that day, the school confirmed it was working to investigate and contain an “active cybersecurity incident,” urging faculty and staff to “shut down university devices, disconnect from university WiFi, and remain extremely vigilant.”
The university said in a statement posted to social media, that the breach could “impact university devices, systems, and cloud-based services.”
A Vanderbilt Health spokesperson confirmed that its hospital and clinical facilities had not been impacted, adding that officials were “proceeding with the utmost care and diligence.”
The ransomware group BYOD appears to have claimed responsibility for the attack, based on messages attributed to them online.
One Vanderbilt employee described to the Banner what she saw on her computer Monday after starting it up. A notification that the computer was running a “system update” was followed by another saying that it was deleting old files, they said. Then came a warning about a ransomware attack with a link to click for more information. At that point, they said, all the computer’s files became “.byod” files.
A faculty member told the Banner that the first signs of a problem came Monday morning when staff started receiving notifications that files in the cloud storage platform Box had been deleted by administrators who confirmed they had not accessed the files. The faculty member said the initial missing files included accreditation information and admissions procedures.
Another source, who was not authorized to speak on the record, said that the IT help line for Vanderbilt’s employees “had crashed.” Multiple other university employees said they had not received any information or guidance beyond Vanderbilt’s public statement about the incident.
The school’s student newspaper, the Vanderbilt Hustler, reported that students were notified about the ongoing incident more than an hour and a half after faculty.
The BYOD group has also recently claimed responsibility for cyberattacks on Michigan State University and the University of New Mexico Health System. The messages claim the group accessed “1 million [Social Security numbers], full names, email addresses, phone numbers, student & employee records.”
The group reportedly apologized after realizing its attack on the University of New Mexico Health System had affected some systems used to help patients and even offered financial compensation. However, the university warned that the offer of assistance could itself be yet another scam.
The statement attributed to BYOD in that case addressed the motive behind their actions.
“We have morals and we have a heart, we are not villains, but we will still continue to hold companies responsible for bad security leading to the compromise of any customer data,” the hackers wrote. “That’s the whole reason why we came about and we plan to keep it that way.”
