University of South Australia
The University of South Australia (UniSA) was hit by a cyber attack over the weekend, causing “major outages” across student applications.
According to the university, several PCs and laptops have been disabled “as a security precaution” as a result of the unspecified attack.
Other applications including the students’ VPN, Citrix virtual application (VA) and staff emails are now currently unavailable.
Areas also down include the online booking systems, user-defined function network drive and incident logging.
In updates on UniSA's advisory page, the affected applications are all said to be under investigation.
“If you are unable to login to your PC or laptop, then please give the IT Help Desk a call to register the problem,” the university said in an advisory on its website and on a Facebook post.
In a reply to a student on Facebook, the university added that "there is no need for students to update their password'', however adding it is "good opportunity to check you're following best practice for passwords".
ARN has contacted UniSA for further comment.
Australian universities have been particularly targeted by cyber attackers over recent years, with as many as seven getting attacked by cyber criminals in a global action targeting researchers three years ago.
In 2019, the Australian Catholic University had its systems compromised and personal data stolen during an attack, while Swinburne University of Technology saw the information of 5,000 people made available online by hackers.
