Cyberattack forces UT San Antonio to delay start of fall semester
The University of Texas at San Antonio pushed back the start of its fall semester by three days after a cyberattack targeted its academic network over the weekend.
Classes that were due to begin on Wednesday, August 19 will now start on Monday, August 24.
UT San Antonio is one of the largest universities in Texas, serving more than 42,000 students.
According to a statement issued by Andrea Marks, Senior Executive Vice President of Enterprise Operations and Strategy and Chief Operating Officer, and Michael Schnabel, CTO, the intrusion attempt was caught “at the edge of our network, before it reached core systems.”
University Technology Solutions (UTS), working with outside incident response specialists, moved to contain the activity. Marks and Schnabel said their investigation so far has turned up no evidence that university data was taken.
“Our response has been effective,” the pair wrote, without giving details on the nature of the attempted intrusion or who might be behind it.
UT San Antonio took some systems and services offline so staff could review the network and shore up defenses before switching everything back on. That measure has meant disruption for students, faculty and staff, including outages on the university phone system and delays with the password reset tool.
“We are making this decision to ensure the university systems, technology and services our students, faculty and staff rely upon are operating optimally as we begin the semester. Starting classes on Monday gives our teams the necessary time to restore services carefully and position our university community for a strong start,” said President Taylor Eighmy.
“As previously shared, the university responded to attempted unauthorized activity of technology systems. Out of an abundance of caution, we proactively took systems and services offline to evaluate our technology environment and reinforce safeguards before bringing services back online,” Eighmy added.
This cyberattack comes just months after a massive breach of Instructure’s Canvas platform, which took place during finals week this past spring and exposed data tied to millions of students and staff worldwide.