Butler Community College has recently come under a series of DDoS attacks. These attacks flood the servers and crash Butlers wifi network. Dom Brown
Dom Brown
Photo & Social Media Editor
For the last month, Butler Community College has been plagued with poor internet connectivity and outages. For extended periods of time, the college is forced to go without internet with infrequent reconnection.
In a recent Twitter survey, 86 percent of participants have been affected by the outages. One participant sophomore Rose Bogner had trouble doing school work.
“It only affected my math class, because we have laptops that we use in that class,” Bogner said. “Other than that, I have a house in town with wifi and my data to use. I use my phone more than I use my laptop.”
The I.T. Department has been working with AT&T engineers along with third party network engineers to fix the problem. In an email sent by Bill Young, the vice president of Digital Transformation, it appears the issue is not within the system, but coming from outside the Butler network.
“Currently, we have engaged with AT&T Tier 2 and 3 engineers as well as third party network engineers to address the problems,” Butler “Tec-E” Andrew Lillard said. “Our staff has been working diligently, all hours of the day and night, to bring this to resolution. We have identified the issues as being outside of the Butler network and are working extensively AT&T and the engineers to resolve the issue. We appreciate your patience and cooperation throughout this and will update you with progress and final resolution. As of right now, it is not.”
The biggest issue is that most work done on campus is through Canvas whether it is students trying to submit homework or access class information or teachers unable to access their course materials such as powerpoints or other course materials.
While a temporary patch was set up, the internet continued to fluctuate throughout the third week of the issue. However as AT&T fixed issues and configuration problems on their side, the college was hit with a full blown Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. This sort of attack pounds the internet connection with a constant stream of traffic that ultimately crashes the internet, according to emails sent to employees. It seems that the attack was sent from a dynamic I.P. address meaning it is incredibly difficult to determine where the attack was initiated.
One of the biggest issues students have had was the lack of communication.
“We found out after the fact,” sophomore Erik Nestor said. “We did receive a banner on Canvas later on, but we have a bunch of those at the beginning of the semester, so I really never saw it.”
As of Thursday, Sept. 27, the Butler Information Services Infrastructure experts and other third parties have implemented a DDoS mitigation service. This patch should remedy the internet connectivity issues at the college. Apart from the patch, the Information Services team will continue to be vigilant towards security awareness and have hopes that these actions will appropriately remedy the situation.
