Janet first came under a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack yesterday, and the same attack has continued through to today forcing much of the academic community offline.
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For those who find Janet’s DNS services sluggish to respond, it may be possible to work around the issue by switching to Google Europe’s DNS.
It also had to close its own website for a period, as it also came under attack.
Janet is the network responsible for running the country’s.ac.uk and.gov.uk domains, so the attack has resulted in many universities, colleges and some councils seeing their websites go down or slow significantly.
The network, used by over 18 million people, is run by the public body Joint Information Systems Committee, Jisc.
A spokeswoman said: We would like to apologise for internet and computer issues that have been experienced across the day. According to the incident timeline on the JISC Twitter account, the network’s administrators were able to fend off attacks in initial phases and even mount defensive countermeasures.
DDoS attacks are malicious attempts to interrupt or degrade an internet-connected service, often by flooding that service with large amounts of network traffic.
“It’s an ongoing battle between attackers and organisations and it’s clear that any industry isn’t above being targeted”, he said.
It is understood the impact at Essex University has been limited to a denial of services rather than any accessing of information.
A spokesman said: “We’ve been experiencing problems with internet access and the impact has varied from user to user”.
Mike Westmacott, cyber consultant at Thales UK, told SC that the Janet network is not the only system that is suffering from a DDoS attack at the moment: “Root DNS servers are now under attack, with a number of similarities to the attacks against the academic network”, he said.
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So, far no one has taken responsibility of these attacks but students believe ISIS could be behind these attacks. “Another is that it is a mistake, and that the authors of the attack did have a specific target in mind, but have released buggy code and the effect is not as intended, therefore they are remaining quiet”.
