The University of London Computer Center became the latest subject of a cyber attack which left millions of students totally helpless in accessing the organization's IT services. The attack, which was later on speculated to be more of the distributed denial of service (DDoS) type, had affected its online learning platform known as Moodle for several hours.

Initial estimates of the issue suggested that it was related to firewall configuration. Later on, technicians were able to figure out that real humans were the culprits behind the problem.

The center had at least kept the students updated throughout Thursday morning right after the attack was made. By 9 a.m., an update said that the problem was narrowed down to a fault in the firewall. At 10 a.m., it said that they tried to reset the core network switches and the firewalls but were not successful. Additionally, the update stated that an engineer is coming over from the center's firewall provider to fix the issue. At 11 a.m., engineers were called in to fix the center's networking problem which was believed to be caused by the firewall issues. By 12 noon, the center announced that its services are back again and said that the networking issue is a result of a cyber attack.

"All our services are now up and running again!" said the ULCC on its website. "The networking issue was caused by a cyber attack. We have taken action to block the source. An incident report will be produced and shared in due course."

Moodle, the open source learning platform that went down because of the attack, provides services to more than 300 institutions in the UK. It also supports more than two million students from the higher education and further education. Some of the affected universities from the hack included the Manchester Metropolitan University, Birkbeck, Queen Mary University and the University of Warwick.

Some of the affected students from the attack also turned to social media to vent their disappointment.

"Paying £9,000 a year for Moodle to be down on results day, good one Plymouth," said Lauren (@BlameLauren).

"ERM How am I supposed to look at my revision slides for my exam tomorrow when Moodle is down @ManMetUni Are you actually serious????????," said Abbie Winter (@abbiewint).

George Anderson, director at Webroot, had reasons to believe that the attack was intentionally made in order to create a maximum impact on a system that is expected to be on its peak usage because of the exam season.

"This attack was clearly implemented to have maximum impact on a system that would have been at peak usage around exam time."

Photo: Ministerio TIC Colombia I Flickr