At 10:00 p.m. on Tuesday October 2, 2007, the UMBC campus was the victim of a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. The attack, coming from hundreds of hosts, generated millions of packets and resulted in the campus Firewall becoming overwhelmed and traffic from off-campus not getting through. OIT staff responded and service was restored by 10:15pm. This affected access to all segments of the UMBC network and impacted sevices such as Blackboard, Webmail, myUMBC and Peoplesoft.
While this kind of event is rare, OIT security staff are investigating this issue and we are looking at what steps may need to be taken in order to mitigate this type of event in the future. We will keep you apprised of any important updates related to this issue.