THUNDER BAY - The cause of a malware incident that took Confederation College offline on the weekend is under investigation as technicians continue to work at restoring services.
The malware incident was noticed by information technology team members with the College early Saturday morning and a cyber security expert has been enlisted to assist with securing the College’s systems and minimize further compromise.
“Services are not fully restored,” said Rob Zuback, director of advancement, communications, and external relations with Confederation College.
“Most of our core IT services have been restored as of today. Our IT team has worked really diligently with our cyber security expert to get that done in an amazing amount of time. We are still undergoing some challenges, we have email that is out, so we are asking the community and the College community to be patient with us as we continue to restore our email.”
Internet was restored Monday morning, as well as Blackboard, shared storage, Banner, the Internal MyCampus Portal, and the external website. Zuback said they are hoping to have email restored in the coming days.
"Our College faculty and staff have been amazing at helping students with deadlines and remedies to offset that,” he said.
It has not yet been determined how this incident happened but Zuback said Thunder Bay Police were notified. Additional protective software is also being installed to detect any further suspicious activity.
“We will be conducting a forensic investigation with our cyber security expert,” Zuback said. “That will take several weeks, but will no doubt it will identify the root cause of why this occurred.”
At this time, Zuback said it does not appear that any personal information of students or faculty has been compromised, but it will be part of the investigation.
“We are not aware of any of that occurring,” he said. “We will be through our forensic investigation be determining that. If there’s been any compromise to any individual’s information, the College will be reaching out to those individuals immediately to make them aware of that.”
