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 departments of the university's IT infrastructure had periodically dropped, culminating in a period of 5 days between late April and early May, when university access to the Internet was completely offline.
During this time, the students were not able to use them credit cards in the University area, but neither 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 could easily reach over 100 Gbps, Exfocus' attack, even if it was only 25 Gbps, was strong enough to persuade university management to spend $ 3.000.000 (€ 2.670.000) on during the summer to upgrade its security measures. Some opinions suggest that this additional cost will lead to a 2,3% increase in student tuition.
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 noted significant and substantial upgrade of the network hardware, which uses DDOS mitigation services attacks, Web server improvements have been made and we have switched 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 up to a provider that has mitigation capabilities for DDoS. I get paid extra if something like this happens. ”
