Examus Representatives Report a DDos Attack

Examus has confirmed that at 12:30 pm all servers experienced problems at once. The problem was by no means limited to the HSE server.

The DDos attack detector showed an abnormal number of requests—over 65 thousand. Even taking into account traffic filtering, this load is 50 times higher than the calculated one. At 15:00 the number of requests dropped to normal.

‘We are working on introducing additional services that we hope will be able to protect against such problems in the future,’ commented Dmitry Istomin, CEO of Examus.

Due to a technical malfunction, exams at several HSE faculties did not take place today. They will be rescheduled for a later date.

All information about the attack will be forwarded to law enforcement agencies.

Previously, our Learning Management System (LMS) was hit with another DDoS attack. ‘Since the LMS is part of the HSE network, all corporate systems and services, including corporate mail, were temporarily unavailable to HSE staff and students working remotely. Due to the attack, the main and backup Internet access channels were overloaded,’ said Boris Linetsky, Head of Technical Systems Infrastructure and Services Unit. He notes: ‘To reduce the load on the channels, the IT Office had to block access to LMS through routing. So, the load on the channels went down.  During the night, after the end of the attack, we transferred the LMS to a DDos-protected address space.’

According to Linetsky, it is difficult to prevent DDoS attacks, but HSE University nevertheless has the necessary solutions, and the level of protection will be increased. ‘Further attempts to make the LMS crash will be successful only with a super-intensive attack, which would be quite difficult even for an experienced hacker. This situation will no longer hamper HSE’s  entire IT infrastructure,’ he added.

June 11, 2020