Sluggish Internet, emergency phone line outages, and Carleton website disruptions that began March 15 and have continued intermittently are being blamed on illegal, massive attacks to university IP addresses.
An IP address is a number assigned to internet devices on a network.
Don Cumming, Carleton’s communications director, said there were multiple service disruptions that occurred between approximately 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. on March 15.
That day, the emergency phone line was offline for about 45 minutes, said campus safety’s shift manager Chris Moy.
The line uses a voice-over Internet protocol system connected to the IT network, he said. During the outage, campus safety used a back-up analog phone line.
Carleton released a statement March 16 saying Internet issues, including very slow response from the network and failure to connect, were ongoing.
Carleton did not specify when the issues would be fixed, but stated Computing and Communication Services (CCS) would continue efforts to troubleshoot the issue with external service vendors.
CCS desk operator Steve Skerlak said the network outage was caused by a denial of service (DOS) attack on a number of Carleton IP addresses.
According to Skerlak, a DOS is a software that keeps sending requests against Carleton’s IPs at a mass scale, which overwhelms the system and shuts it down.
Software that engage in these deliberate attacks is illegal, according to Skerlak.
He said CCS has been working on defending Carleton’s Internet from the DOS attack by changing the IPs to interfere with the requests sent.
The Internet Service Providers for Carleton—Rogers, Orion, and Telus—are collaborating with Carleton to troubleshoot the issue, he said.
CCS advised students and network users to limit bandwidth intensive applications such as YouTube and Skype video messaging.
CCS does not know when the network will be fully restored.
—with files from Taylor Barrett
