Malware attack disables U of C IT services

By Jason Herring, May 30 2016 —

A malware attack is to blame for the IT issues that disabled access to University of Calgary computer services over the weekend. The services affected included the AIRUC-Secure wi-fi network and Office 365 webmail. The attack restricted access to U of C computers.

As of May 30, all services have been restored by IT staff except for Exchange email and Skype for Business, which will remain down until further notice, the U of C said in a statement.

“Thanks to the hard work of IT teams, major progress has been made towards resolving current systems issues caused by malware, which is software intended to damage or disable computers and computer systems,” the statement read.

The outage coincided with the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Canada’s largest annual gathering of scholars, which the U of C is hosting. The university claims none of the Congress events were or will be affected.

Services such as Desire2Learn and myUofC were not affected by the attack.