On Thursday, Feb. 15, the University of Rhode Island experienced a system disruption, denying most of the URI community from opening their emails and logging into e-Campus.
URI Information Technology Services initiated an investigation into the disruption Friday, according to the University statement. There was no disruption to class schedules or other operations.
While most systems were not impacted, there was an interruption to access on some online platforms. Fortunately, ITS had successfully restored access to most systems on Friday and they expected full restoration for all users by the end of the day.
ITS had no evidence that accounts had been compromised on either the Narragansett Bay or Providence campus, or that they were offline, Michele North, IT team leader said. The next steps were going to be taken care of by URI Communications. They were in charge of giving updates about the disruption to the community.
By 9:03 p.m. Friday, e-Campus had been restored, Interim Chief Information Officer Gabriele Fariello said in an update. In order to access it, the community had to reset their passwords and clear browser cache or open a private window.
“Our ITS team responded swiftly and will be working with an external forensic firm that is conducting the investigation,” Fariello said.
When the disruption happened, there was a lot of confusion, said Jim Goodwin, an adjunct volunteer for the library. He lost his email and Google Calendar and couldn’t get his password until he contacted the IT desk.
This was a problem because there were students contacting him about questions for the library. He’s also dealt with these kinds of attacks before, and the only way to stop the attack is resetting your password.
“I won’t use Google Calendar or email in the future,” Goodwin said. “I’ll use alternates instead and just back up.”
On Monday, ITS announced another update considering e-Campus use. While the community was still able to use it, ITS was experiencing issues with the HR and financials tabs and were working with the vendor to resolve.
If you changed your password for e-Campus, and logged into Campus Solutions, the longest wait time until it propagated HR and financials was four hours. If there were issues logging into HR and finance, e-Campus users had to wait two hours and try again.
On Tuesday, the e-Campus system was resolved, an IT alert said. There might be some slowness; after changing the password, there might have been a wait to access HR and financials. Other systems are working as expected.
On Wednesday, there were no updates, according to the ITS website. The system disruption investigation is still going on as IT provides new alerts on their website throughout the week. Currently they’re experiencing high call volume and wait times because of the system outage.
For additional help and questions, contact the IT desk through zoom, [email protected] or walk-ins at the basement of Carothers Library, Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., according to their website . Their phone number is (401) 874-4357.