Laurentian University still restoring services following Feb. 18 'cyber incident'
CBC
Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ont. continues to restore services after a "cyber incident" on Feb. 18 knocked many offline.
Michael Keenan, a third-year computer science student at Laurentian, said it was a stressful experience when services were first affected last month.
"I couldn't access anything. None of my friends could access anything," he said.
"So we're all kind of freaking out because the professors can't exactly email us because we can't get into our emails."
Due to the cyber incident, many students and faculty members did not have access to their Laurentian emails, on-campus internet and an online learning platform called D2L, which includes information on course readings and assignments.
While those services have been restored, Keenan said it's been a patchwork in other areas.
One of his professors, he said, hosted a course website on Laurentian's servers, and that still isn't accessible. Laurentian's primary website was also still offline, as of March 12.
Keenan said Wi-Fi access on campus remains spotty, with temporary hotspots set up that have proven to be unreliable at times.
"The strongest place with a W-iFi connection is surprisingly, the planetarium, because it's a separate Wi-Fi system," he said.
Keenan added that some of his grades have been negatively affected by the service outages.
"So it's not unreasonable for some sort of, like, consolation," he said.
"It would be at least appreciated. It wouldn't make up for everything happening, but it would dampen the blow to our psyche as a group of students."
On March 6 Laurentian confirmed in a news release that it experienced a "limited data breach" due to the cyber incident on Feb. 18.
In the update the university said data was stolen that could affect people associated with the Living with Lakes Centre, Co-operative Freshwater Ecology Unit and the Northern Ontario School of Medicine.