It seems that the University of Exeter is currently in the middle of a major virus outbreak, which has led to their IT team shutting down the entire campus network, including their telephone system in an attempt to contain the problem.

The attack appears to have started on Monday. The campus network was shutdown at around 2:00pm as a direct response to the threat. However, the problems seem to be continuing today (Wednesday).

The university’s home page suggests that staff and students are only able to access email externally using home computers and the like.

The communications advice issued by the university says that it “is currently experiencing a severe IT incident, and as a precautionary measure we’ve taken much of our network offline. Parts of the University are being brought back online today as soon as it is safe to do so. The University switchboard is online and can accept calls, but we are unable to transfer them to some affected areas of the University.”

Sources in Exeter suggest that the virus has not been identified, but it is thought that the university was deliberately targeted. Stuart Franklin, a spokesman for the university, speaking to the local evening paper, the Express & Echo, said: “We were attacked by a virus. It was a malicious attack. It is the first time I have known such an attack to succeed.”

It seems clear that this virus is extremely virulent and has managed to spread quickly and easily. This strongly suggests that it managed to circumvent the university’s antivirus systems and may have been akin to a zero-day virus.

Although a difficult decision, I believe that closing down the infrastructure in such circumstances is the right thing to do.

This incident should provide food for thought for many organisations. The cost of closing down a network is extremely expensive in terms of lost revenue and opportunities, even before the sheer amount of professional time spent checking systems and returning them to service is taken into consideration.

In fact, this sort of attack can cause immense damage to an organisation and is relatively easy to perpetrate, which has not escaped the notice of Lloyd’s of London Emerging Risks Team in their October 2009 report: ‘Digital Risks: Views of a Changing Risk Landscape’. The report states that “The value of data can vary enormously, but for some organisations it could mean bankruptcy.”

The interesting aspect to this attack is that the university believes it was “hit by the virus deliberately”.

I think we may see an increase in this sort of attack in the future. The recession has been very deep and many people with criminal intent and technical capability across the world may turn to cyber-crime.

In the first two weeks of January, we’ve seen the national governments of France and Germany warn their citizens about security flaws in Internet Explorer after an attack on Google’s site in China (along with some 20 other organisations), which Microsoft admitted late last week were part of the attack mechanism. The code that exploits these particular flaws were published on Monday, 18th January 2010 and there are already some reports of it being used maliciously.

Although the problems at the University of Exeter and the issues with Internet Explore rare probably not connected, the trend for increased, malicious attacks is clear.

This weblog is produced by Revell Research Systems.

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