The chaos caused at Laurentian University following a cyber incident affecting the university’s IT system last month was outlined by LU interim president Sheila Embleton at a March 19 meeting.
She thanked university employees for going above and beyond in making sure crucial tasks were still completed, despite the IT outages, which affected systems including campus wifi, the teaching software D2L and the university’s website.
Many of these systems have since been restored. (You can view the status of Laurentian’s IT systems online here).
“It's really a testimony to everybody on campus, I think,” she said. “I think of those processing three payrolls within days of the attack, of those who made sure our most important bills were paid, of those who made sure our admission offers went out on time, of those who got the T4s and other tax-related forms out by mail, of those who got transcripts out by mail, of the calls for paper, envelopes, printer cartridges and printers that could work without being networked – things we thought we had abandoned a long time ago.”
“I also think of those in-person instructors who, within a week, had to give up most of the teaching technology we have become so used to and revert to techniques abandoned a decade or longer ago.
“And of course the online instructors who simply couldn’t do anything in the way that they were used to.”
With the cyber incident taking up so much of Laurentian’s energy, Embleton also reported that there has been “extremely limited” progress on LU’s operational transformation stemming from its 2021-22 insolvency over the past month.
The budget process for the 2024-25 fiscal year remains underway, but the cyber incident also threw a monkey wrench into this work.
“You can imagine how difficult and labour-intensive this was for those involved with no systems available for much of that time,” Embleton wrote. “It is still about a month before the budgets will go to the Board Finance Committee, and we intend to meet that deadline.”
Embleton said that typical of all emergency incidents, communication is always challenging. Laurentian settled upon daily online status reports along with Zoom town hall meetings.
“There are questions of what is known and what is not known, and making sure one does not contribute to misinformation or speculation or inadvertently reveal information to the ‘threat actors,’” she said.
Embleton said she hopes the cyber incident remains unique in her career and those of her colleagues
“Through it all, I want to thank the entire university community for their patience and understanding as well as some beyond our immediate community here at Laurentian, and others who made offers to help (HSN, Boréal, Cambrian, MCU, and others who I am forgetting or who I never knew about),” she said.
“I think there is a general recognition out there in similar institutions that in the current world, this could really have happened to any one of them, and we need to support each other.”
Embleton was asked by senate member Christina McMillan Boyles about the university’s scantron machine for marking tests, which is also out of commission following the cyber incident.
Senate members heard that there’s currently no ETA for a functional scantron machine, and the possibility of borrowing one from Cambrian College was brought up.
“As I mentioned earlier in the report, we certainly have been getting support from others,” Embleton said. “So if someone else like Cambrian or Boréal would have the possibility to help, maybe that's something to think about.”
Heidi Ulrichsen is Sudbury.com’s assistant editor. She also covers education and the arts scene.
