14 DAY TRIAL // Two websites owned and operated by the University of Texas at Austin – the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas and the International Symposium for Online Journalism (ISOJ) – have been restored after being disrupted by a massive cyberattack.
The attack, which came around one month before the 14th edition of the International Symposium on Online Journalism, started on March 11. To address the issue, the Information Technology department of the University of Texas at Austin – which hosts both of the affected sites – placed them under quarantine.
In the meantime, provisional WordPress websites were created.
The Knight Center reports that its learning program and the ISOJ registration system have not been affected by the attack.
So who was behind the attack? According to Professor Rosental Alves, founder and director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin, they don’t know, but the attack has been traced back to Russia.
“The malicious cyber-attack was enough to shut our websites down, but not to enough to shut us up. We rapidly created WordPress blogs to continue our regular and unique report on Journalism in the Americas,” Alves explained.
“We have no idea why someone would want to attack our sites, but our engineers noticed that the origin of the cyber-attack was in computers located in Russia,” Professor Alves added.
“We had to shut down the sites, while the University of Texas IT department conduct its work to clean the sites and make sure increase its security levels. We are happy to be back with our normal presence on the Web.”