As I'm sure you've noticed, we are down again.

We do have a bit more information now that we can share. At this point it would appear that WSC is the victim of what is called a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDOS). There are dozens (perhaps hundreds) of machines on the internet periodically attempting to flood one or more campus computers with hundreds of thousands of connection attempts. While the campus equipment is handling the load and our firewall is appropriately blocking the traffic, the inbound connection attempts are queuing up and the carrier's switch in the downtown office appears to be unable to deal with the backlog and fails. The carrier is supposed to be preparing a replacement switch from a different vendor that should be capable of sustaining service through the attack.

In the meantime, we have worked with our counterparts at the State to block some portions of the DDOS traffic at the edge of the State's network so that it relieves some pressure on the carrier's equipment until they can get the replacement unit installed.

As we have more information we'll keep you posted.

Again, we appreciate your patience as we try to work with the vendor to get this resolved.

JD