Cyberattack takes Okanagan College offline, impact on personal data unclear

Photo: Colin Dacre

Okanagan College has been hit by a cyberattack, taking the school’s entire network and website offline.

It’s not clear at this point if personal information has been compromised, but students and staff are being told to watch their financial accounts closely.

The college’s network and internet access has been offline since Monday morning. On Wednesday morning, the school finally revealed the reason for the outage.

In a letter to students, Okanagan College president Neil Fassina says their IT services team “interrupted a cyber-security incident” at about 6:15 a.m. on Monday.

“This incident, which involved an unrecognized external agent, was identified by our team’s routine and proactive surveillance.”

Within 45 minutes, the college shut down and disabled network access to all campuses and launched an investigation. External cyber-security experts were called in.

“Unfortunately, as a result of the cyber attack, our network services continue to be offline and this morning, the outage has impacted our public website and learning management site (Moodle),” Fassina said.

It has also impacted the college’s ability to send all-user emails to students and staff.

Fassina said they are working to restore secure access as soon as possible. They are still working to determine if any personal information has been compromised.

“Although it is a priority for us to restore access to the network as soon as possible, we must do this in a safe and secure way,” Fassina continued.

Out of an abundance of caution, we are notifying the community of this cyber attack.

Students and staff are being advised to be vigilant and not send personal information in response to unusual emails or text messages in the days ahead and “stay aware of unauthorized transactions related to any of your accounts.”