The campus web server on late Friday and early Saturday morning for just a few hours was unreachable from off campus. During this time the CITES firewall blocked a denial of services (DoS) attack from reaching the campus web server. This attack may or may not have been intentional. There were over 60,000 different IP addresses involved. In this particular situation the number of bad requests were so great that valid off campus requests could not get through.
CITES will be researching if the attack was accidental or intentional. They will also identify what strategy can be employed in the future to deal with this particular type of DoS.
In the nine years I have been with the university this is the first such attack that I am aware of. I would like to thank the following people at CITES for their hard work in dealing with this issue over the weekend.
Chris Kuehn
Mary Stevens
Bob Bregant
Jeremy Watson
All updates will be posted to this blog topic.
