Cyberattack leaves Université de Moncton website offline 10 days later

Across the Université de Moncton campus in Moncton, N.B., it’s business as usual, but online, things have come to a halt.

“About 10 days ago our systems detected a cyber incident, so we’ve took down our website and we’re trying to regroup and analyze what happened,” said Gabriel Cormier, vice-president of administration and human resources at the university.

On Oct. 14, the school’s Cyber Intrusion Detection system flagged a problem.

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Cormier says there’s no indication that any personal or sensitive data has been affected, but the website has been offline ever since.

“Some of the employees, we have forms that they use that are part of the website, things like that, but the course, descriptions and everything else has been offline. So, registration for the winter term is coming up, so students need access to that,” he said.

As for when the website might be fully back up and running, Cormier says he can’t give an exact timeline since the investigation is ongoing.

The school has brought in an outside company to investigate the incident.

He says the goal is to restore the website as soon as possible.

“We are upgrading our security systems and trying best practices and everything else, we have outside council as well to help us with that,” said Cormier.

“Restoring the website will not be exactly as it was before, so we’re moving forward on that.”

Scott Beck, CEO of Becktek – a cyber security and IT support for businesses – says this is unlikely to leave the university any more vulnerable in the future.

“What we have to understand is for cyber criminals, it’s a business and they’re writing code to go out and beat on all the doors around the internet and they really don’t care who they get, they just want to see where they can get and how they can monetize it,” he said.

Overall, he says cyber crimes have seen exponential growth year over year.

“About 15 per cent of the world’s GDP, so that’s like 15 per cent of the world economy, is based around cyber crime,” he said.

“We’re talking billions of dollars and it’s very high reward, very low risk because there’s only about 0.5 to one per cent of cyber criminals that ever get caught.”

Beck points out that cyber gangs usually find a specific niche and will continue to target the same type of business or area repeatedly.

“Here’s the sad part, every person, every business at sometime, somewhere is going to be impacted,” he said.

“A lot of us have been impacted and don’t even know it yet because these websites are storing our username and passwords and from human behaviour, we tend to use the same across a lot of places.”

While the Université de Moncton says only their website has been affected, Beck says it’s good practice for everyone to use different passwords for different sites and change them, especially if you think they’ve been compromised.

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