University of Winnipeg network still reeling from 'cyber incident'

A "cyber incident" at the University of Winnipeg that forced the cancellation of classes on Monday is still affecting several services students rely on, leaving some worried about exams and the safety of their personal information.

"We can't access the library. We can't access any of our courses. We can't access our WebAdvisor for registration. All of that was just completely gone" following the outage that began Sunday, said Jasmine Wieve, who is in her final year of a bachelor's degree in science and biology.

"It's really frustrating for a lot of people because it's exam season, and if you can't access the course load then you can't really study very well."

Wieve said she also has lab reports due next Monday but has no idea about how she's supposed to submit them.

A virtual town hall is planned for 4 p.m. Wednesday to give an update on the situation, the university said in a statement on its website.

Classes at the downtown campus resumed Tuesday but Nexus, the learning management system in which course content is contained online, remains inaccessible, the university said in its statement.

In addition to Nexus, the following services are also unavailable at this time:

• WebAdvisor.
• Colleague.
• VPN.
• Printing.

Regular campus internet and Wi-Fi is also offline but a temporary network has been created.

'Kinda left in the dark': student

The university's term is wrapping up and exams are starting next week, but first-year education student John Paul Mirabel said he's "really concerned about how that's going to happen."

"It's been really difficult to access our notes. Everything is in our Nexus page," he said.

Some professors have sent emails with notes and files that students can use to study, which will help, Mirabe said.

"But [the outage] will for sure play an impact for next week." 

He's also concerned that personal and financial information, as well as transcripts of grades, could have been compromised.

"One-hundred per cent, I've been very, very worried about my information and what people can do with that."

Wieve was a little more optimistic.

"They said that they caught it quite early," she said. "So I feel like, for the most part, we're pretty safe. Hopefully."

First-year education student Morgan Johnson said it would be nice to have reassurance, but details on what exactly happened have not been easy to come by.

"No one really knows. The profs can't tell us much — they don't know much," she said. "We're kinda left in the dark."

The outage, which the university described as a "cyber incident," was discovered Sunday. It also resulted in classes being cancelled Monday at the U of W Collegiate, a preparatory high school on campus for grades 9-12.

"Upon discovering the incident, the university took immediate steps to secure its network, which included making a variety of services unavailable. We are now in the process of restoring the interrupted services, investigating the incident, and better understanding its impact," the U of W's statement says.

The university reported the incident to Winnipeg Police Service and the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, and is working with authorities to determine the cause.

"We appreciate that this incident raises concerns within our campus community, and we will continue to share updates as more information becomes available," the statement says.