Nearly seven months after a cyber attack at the University of Guelph, officials have begun notifying people whose personal information “may have been accessed.”
The attack was first reported on Sept. 11. University officials acknowledged in October that “limited information” had been compromised.
“The university has taken steps to further strengthen the security of its systems and has securely restored all essential IT systems,” states a post on the university’s IT update page on Wednesday. “The university will continue to engage relevant experts and authorities to protect and mitigate against further incidents.”
School officials are contacting the impacted individuals to provide additional information and recommend next steps, the post notes.
The cyber attack resulted in a variety of electronic services either going down or being shut down by university officials in response.
Among the services impacted were VPN access to university systems, Eduroam, services hosted in the university data centre, shared file storage/CFS file shares, printing at the campus library, and editing capabilities for Drupal and WordPress websites hosted by CCS.
Debit and credit systems, as well as the parking permit systems also went down but were restored within a couple days.
Staff and students were urged to change their login passwords.
The Information and Privacy Commissioner (IPC) of Ontario has been involved in reviewing the attack.
University officials notified the IPC of the breach on Sept 19, a spokesperson previously told GuelphToday. The IPC only gets involved in matters that involve personal information.
