“In the history of our district, I don’t believe there has been an effort at this scale or this complexity,” Chancellor Gregory Smith said.
SAN DIEGO — The San Diego Community College District is dealing with what its chancellor calls the largest cyberattack in the district’s history, forcing the entire network offline and disrupting classes as the semester winds down.
The attack began Saturday morning when network specialists noticed suspicious activity and immediately moved to shut off access, according to Chancellor Gregory Smith. The breach affected all four campuses: City, Mesa, Miramar and the College of Continuing Education.
“In the history of our district, I don’t believe there has been an effort at this scale or this complexity,” Smith said.
Technicians initially thought they had stopped the attack on Saturday, but the threat resumed Monday morning, revealing a more serious problem.
“When we came back online Monday morning, the attacks resumed… it became clear this was a more sophisticated and coordinated attempt,” Smith said.
Since Monday, the district has remained completely offline, with Wi-Fi, websites, and file servers all down. The outage forced some bookstores and cafeterias to close initially, though food services have since resumed with backup support.
“Point-of-sale systems require internet access… we’ve brought in backup support, so food services are back up. But several offices rely on appointment systems that aren’t functional yet, so we’ve had to find alternative ways to deliver services,” Smith said.
Students are feeling the impact as they approach final exams. At City College, planned PowerPoint presentations turned into discussions, and students struggled to complete online assignments.
“We were going to have a PowerPoint presentation, but it turned into a discussion because we didn’t have access to it,” one student said. Another added, “It’s hard because we’re ending the semester… we’re working on our discussion, but we don’t have internet access.”
The district has brought in hot spots to support key buildings, including the library.
Smith said no personal information was stolen, crediting recent security upgrades that moved critical systems to the cloud.
“We’ve made a lot of investments to move critical systems to the cloud… systems that recognize unusual patterns worked in this case. Fortunately, we’re dealing with the frustration of systems being down — not the consequences of personal information being compromised,” he said.
The San Diego Community College District hopes to get things back up and running by Friday afternoon.
