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The University of Manchester has been hit by a cyber attack of an undisclosed nature
By
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Alex Scroxton,
Security Editor
Published: 09 Jun 2023 10:59
The University of Manchester in northern England has been hit by a cyber attack that seems to have resulted within the exfiltration of an as-yet unknown amount of information.
In an announcement, the college’s registrar, secretary and chief working officer, Patrick Hackett, revealed that some of its techniques had been accessed by an unauthorised social gathering and information copied.
Hackett advised college students that the college’s IT groups and exterior cyber help was working to determine what information has been compromised, and totally resolve the incident.
The organisation has additionally been involved with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the National Crime Agency (NCA).
“We know this will cause concern to members of our community and we are very sorry for this,” mentioned Hackett. “Our priority is to resolve this issue and provide information to those affected as soon as we are able to, and we are focusing all available resources.”
Hackett advised college students and workers to “carry on as usual” however to be vigilant in regard to any suspicious exercise focusing on them, significantly phishing emails.
“We also advise staff not to download files from university systems in order to back them up,” he added.
Although restricted info is obtainable at this stage, college students and workers can contact the college through e-mail at [email protected] if they’ve additional questions.
At the time of writing, there isn’t any obtainable proof to counsel that the University of Manchester is coping with a ransomware attack, though it actually bears some of the hallmarks of this sort of incident. Its external-facing web sites stay accessible from the web.
A member of the Russell Group of UK analysis universities, the red-brick University of Manchester is the third largest college within the nation with greater than 90,000 undergraduate functions each tutorial 12 months. Its consolidated revenue for the 2021-22 12 months was £1.2bn, £270.6m of this determine acquired from analysis grants and contracts.
Notable alumni embrace the just lately deceased novelist Martin Amis, Ed O’Brien of Radiohead, and actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Toby Jones. Its Department of Computer Science, the longest established within the UK, produced names akin to pc designer and former chief scientific advisor to Margaret Thatcher’s authorities, John Fairclough, the designer of the BBC Micro and the ARM 32-bit RISC microprocessor, Steve Furber, and of course Alan Turing.
Notable threats to universities
Universities face a spread of cyber safety threats due to the big quantity of information they maintain on their pupil our bodies, which is very beneficial to cyber criminals in search of monetary achieve. However, in addition to financially motivated cyber assaults, they’re additionally thought-about weak to nation-state backed menace actors seeking to steal information and mental property to achieve strategic benefits on the world stage.
The NCSC assesses that cyber crime presents probably the most instantly evident and disruptive drawback to the tutorial sector, whereas that state-backed actions usually tend to trigger long-term injury, with knock-on results together with impacts to the worth and high quality of analysis, falls in funding, and injury to the UK’s science and expertise sector.
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…. to be continued
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