Rutgers working with police to find hacker after latest cyber attack

The university was hit with a cyber attack Monday that left most of the 65,000-student university without internet access for much of the day.

NEW BRUNSWICK -- Rutgers University officials are working with local police and the FBI to find a cyber attacker who crippled the school's computer network earlier this week, campus administrators said.

The university was hit with a DDoS - or distributed denial of service attack - around 10 a.m. Monday that crashed Rutgers' websites and left most of the 65,000-student university without internet access for much of the day.

The attack was at least the fifth at Rutgers in less than a year.

"You should know that we are working with state and federal law enforcement officials on this matter," Don Smith, Rutgers' vice president for information technology, said in a message to the campus community Monday evening.

It is unclear if Monday's cyber attack is related to the other DDoS attacks that hit Rutgers during the 2014-2015 school year. In each of those cases, a hacker used "bots," or compromised computers, to flood Rutgers' networks with requests. That paralyzed Rutgers' internet and wifi access and left the public unable to get on most of the university's websites.

An alleged hacker using the name Exfocus took credit for the previous attacks on Rutgers'  networks in several social media posts and in an interview with a local tech blogger last spring. On Monday, Exfocus posted several taunting emails on his or her Twitter account before and during the latest Rutgers attack.

"where internet go?? 3m dollar gone?" read one tweet, posted around noon.

The tweets were later removed, but several students captured screen shots of Exfocus' Twitter page while the tweets were still visible to the public.

Rutgers officials previously said they plan to spend up to $3 million this year upgrading cyber security. The university has already hired three cyber security consulting firms to test its network and add new defenses, including new filters designed to help prevent DDoS attacks.

The school also upgraded its computer hardware, switched internet providers and added new layers of security.

Students are covering the cost of many of the upgrades. The added cost of computer security was one of the reasons Rutgers officials cited when they raised tuition this summer.

Smith, the Rutgers vice president overseeing the security upgrade, apologized to students, faculty and staff members for the inconvenience the "disruptive and annoying" attacks caused on campus.

But, he warned more attacks could be coming.

"DDoS attacks are becoming more frequent in cyberspace; they are being experienced in higher education, government and by commercial enterprises. There is no doubt that they will happen again," Smith said in his message to the campus community.

As of Monday night, Rutgers' internet access appeared to be working again, through some services and sites may still experience problems,  school officials said.

As with the previous cyber attacks, no student information or other data was stolen from Rutgers' networks.

"This was not a situation where any data was compromised," Smith said.