A hacker known as the nickname Exfocus resumed the DDoS attack, aiming at it Rutgers University in New Jersey, after having made another four attacks in March through May this year.
In previous attacks various parts of the university's IT infrastructure had periodically gone down, culminating in a 5-day period between late April and early May when the university's access to thenetwork ήταν εντελώς offline.
During this time, students were not able to use credit cards at the University's premises, nor did the Sakai and eCollege LMS (Learning Management System) applications.
According to one an interview given by the hacker to Dimitry Apollonsky, a client asked him to attack Rutgers and for his services he had paid a bit on Bitcoin. In the same interview, the hacker revealed he was in possession of a botnet that numbered over 85.000 machines and was able to launch 25 Gbps attacks.
While recent DDoS attacks can easily reach over 100 Gbps, Exfocus's attack, even if it was only 25 Gbps, was powerful enough to convince the university administration to spend $3.000.000 (€2.670.000) against during the summer to upgrade the measures security of. Some opinions argue that this additional expense will cause a 2,3% increase in student fees.
Despite all the exorbitant expense, the latest DDOS attack seems to have had no problem getting through and knocking out internet and WiFi access for the entire university.
In a message to the official his Facebook page Rutgers' spokesman said:
"Since then, we have seen a significant and substantial upgrade of the network hardware, which uses DDOS attack mitigation services, Web server improvements have been made, and we have changed providers with new ones that provide additional deterrent capabilities to DDoS threats."
In the aforementioned Apollonsky interview, Exfocus said:
“I hope the university will sign on to a provider that will have possibilities mitigation for DDoS. I get paid extra if that happens.”
