Laurentian University 'cyber incident' cuts off online students from their classes

Since Feb.18, Kaitlyn Dickinson has been unable to contact her professors or access her course materials at Laurentian University.

Dickinson is an online student in the university's equity, diversity and human rights program.

Thatmorning, Laurentian experienced what it callsa "cyber incident" that forced staff in its information technology department to disconnect the university's network.

"Basically in a situation like this you want to contain, which we've done within hours," said Luc Roy, Laurentian's chief information officer, during a virtual town hall meeting about the incident on Tuesday.

"Then you want to be able to start working on bringing back the services," he added.

Those services include internet access on campus, access to email for students, staff and faculty members, the university website and access to an online learning platform called D2L.

"No services are working for me at all. I think I have access to my email and that's been about it for the entire duration of the cyber incident," said Dickinson, who lives in Owen Sound,about 385 kilometres from Laurentian's Sudbury, Ont. campus.

Dickinson said she relies on D2L to access her coursework and assignments.

"They say that D2L, getting our course material back up is a priority," she said.

"This has been a really long time and if it continues for the rest of the week, or even a few more days, I'm not sure how anybody's going to be able to catch up, even though we have assurances that we will be able to."

After the outage, Laurentian set up a temporary websitethat answers some frequently asked questions about the situation.

"As this was a sudden, unexpected event, it is expected that instructors will be flexible to ensure that students are not penalized or adversely impacted by something completely outside of their control," said an update on Feb. 27.

The university also held a virtual town hall meeting on Zoom with senior administrators, including interim president Sheila Embleton present to answer questions.

We don't really know what's happening. There's no timeline.- Kaitlyn Dickinson, Laurentian University student

But Dickinson said Laurentian's updates haven't been reassuring, with few concrete answers and no description of what the cyber incident was.

"As far as communication, I think it's kind of comparable to what happened during the restructuring, where there's a lot of assurances that everything's going to be okay, but we're still left in the dark," she said.

"We don't really know what's happening. There's no timeline."

Junior Williams, a cybersecurity consultant and professor at the Toronto School of Management, told CBC News that universities are common targets for cyber criminals who are looking to steal intellectual property, people's identities, or ask for a ransom in exchange for the university's encrypted data.

In the town hall meeting Roy, Laurentian's chief information officer, said authentication services could be back up and running soon, but could not provide a precise timeline.

Roy said getting authentication services back online would give people access to email and D2L. He said getting wired internet access back on campus is also a big priority.

Kayla Peddle is a third-year student in Laurentian's sports psychology and concurrent education programs.

She lives on campus,and said she hasn't had access to WiFi since she returned from reading week on Sunday.

Peddle said her professors have been understanding about the situation, and will do their best to accommodate students, but that's not the case for everyone.

"I have friends who have professors who aren't so nice and and those are going to be those [students]who are going to go through it a lot worse," she said.

Peddle said she also worries her private information might have been compromised due to the cyber incident.

"It's always a concern because we pay for our school, they have our banking, they have all these things right?" she said. "They have our full names. They have our SINs if we work here too."

During Laurentian's town hall meeting on Tuesday,Cleste Boyer, legal counsel for the university, said Laurentian could not yet confirm if people's personal information was compromised.

"We are still in the early stages of working on understanding what information may have been taken," Boyer said.

"Of course, unfortunately, that's all we can say today."

Concern over Laurentian's reputation

Mia Valllire, a fourth-year criminology student at Laurentian, said the service outage has cut off her access to research databases she and other students use to access peer-reviewed journal articles.

"So we have to find them by our own means, which takes more time," Valllire said.

She said scholarships that are handled by the university are also unavailable due to the cyber incident.

Valllire said her biggest concern is how the outage affects Laurentian's reputation and students' future prospects, especially after the school went through an insolvency that decimated programs.

"This is not a vacation for us. This is not a break for us," she said.

"We do deserve to be taken seriously as [graduate school] candidates who care about one another and about our education. My biggest concern is that our future success is not impacted by the cyber incident or insolvency or anything like that."