King’s internet is down after a cyber attack

King’s students have been left without WiFi after a “continued and persistent” cyber attack.

King’s WiFi operates through a system known as JANET, a publicly funded computer network. This morning it was taken offline by what has now been identified as a cyber attack.

This is a tactic often used by hackers, such as those who hacked the Xbox and PlayStation networks.  The attack itself appears to have been progressing since shortly after 9am yesterday morning, but had appeared initially to be fixed.

According to reports, they are still working on try to the fix the issue, but with no resolution yet – harrowing news for students looking to access results and submit coursework on KEATS.

In a statement, IT services said: “JANET, the organisation which provide internet access for all UK universities, is currently experiencing technical difficulties due to an ongoing denial of service attack.

“Any service that relies on the internet may be affected. This includes general web browsing, Webmail, eduroam wi-fi, access to external systems, staff telephone service, and any internal systems that talk to the outside world, for example providing feedback in FASER.”

The company behind behind this network, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), were tweeting about the outages – but then said: “We suspect that those behind today’s DDOS attack are adjusting their point of attack based on our Twitter updates.”

But for third year student Charlotte Allen,  the outage has raised even more pressing concerns.

Speaking to The Tab, she said: “Thank goodness for mobile data, how else would we all continuously refresh Facebook during our lectures?”