After several government networks, a US university in Colorado became the victim of anonymous hackers. It was last week when Regis University's information technology services were shut down on Thursday due to a "malicious threat" which most probably came from outside the country.
Reports said that the IT system of this Colorado-based university, which has a total undergraduate enrolment of nearly 4,000 students, went down during the summer school finals and remained inactive during the arrival of fall semester students on Monday, August 26.
The attack not only caused the shutdown of the Regis' website, but it also interrupted the email services, phone lines and online programs that the students use to submit work. The private Jesuit institution, after this attack, had to create another web page regisupdates.com, to communicate with its students and faculty.
The Denver Post reported that the university has started an investigation into the data breach incident and the officials from Regis have declined to say whether it was a ransomware attack or not.
This is not the first incident of a cyber attack which targeted an educational institute, as recently New York's Monroe College and Massachusetts' Cape Cod Community College also faced similar cybersecurity issues.
It was reported that in July this year, hackers managed to lock Monroe students and faculty out of the college website, its learning management system and email system. Later, these cybercriminals demanded almost $2 million in Bitcoin to restore access. Even though Monroe successfully restored the website, they haven't released any details regarding the ransom payment.
In another incident, cybercriminals targeted Cape Cod Community College and stole over $800,000 from its bank accounts. But after an investigation, the college recovered more than $677,500 which they lost due to the cyber attack.
