DDOS Attack

Champlain campus internet went down earlier in the week after an upstream distributed denial of service or DDOS attack.

Network performance was severely degraded on the afternoon of Monday, March 1st as one of Champlain’s internet providers was hit with the attack.

With most students attending classes remotely, the internet is more important than ever in students getting the education they need, and it can cause massive problems if it goes down.

A DDOS attack is a type of cyberattack where the attacker will send large amounts of network traffic to the target system with the hope of overwhelming the system's ability to respond to requests. Taking that system down for as long as the network traffic continues or until the victim finds a way to filter out the malicious traffic from the genuine traffic.

On the afternoon of March 1st Chris North, the director of the infrastructure at Champlain College started to see network services going down. “And then we started to get reports from people who lived on campus saying that their internet connectivity was poor, that they were unable to reach sites that were off-campus” North said. In the process of troubleshooting the problem, he reached out to Champlain’s primary internet service provider. They informed him that they were experiencing a denial of service attack.

This attack was not directed at Champlain College but somebody upstream; North believes Champlain was simply caught in the crossfire. “I think it was even further upstream from them [the service provider] because we have multiple internet providers and it seemed like more than one of our providers was affected by this.” This is corroborated by outages affecting other Burlington area internet providers around the same time, also blamed on a DDOS attack.

With the large role that internet access plays in attending remote classes during the pandemic, an internet outage is more disruptive than ever to learning. Students may be understandably concerned about the stability of campus internet in the future, but fortunately, according to North these events aren’t very common. “I’ve been working at Champlain for about 9 years now maybe 3 or 4 times so far that we’ve seen something like this.”

By Fiona Wilson

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