Education

Morehead State University declines to provide further details on July cyberattack

Morehead State University experienced a cyberattack last month, impacting technology operations throughout campus, but few details have been released in the weeks since.
Morehead State University experienced a cyberattack last month, impacting technology operations throughout campus, but few details have been released in the weeks since. The Associated Press

Morehead State University experienced a cyberattack last month that impacted some operations on campus throughout July, but the school has since released few details about what happened.

The cyberattack was discovered when the campus had a technology service disruption, according to an email sent from Morehead President Jay Morgan to students and employees on July 13. No personal data of students or employees was believed to be compromised at that time, Morgan said in a copy of the email provided to the Herald-Leader.

“We have discovered that we may have been subjected to a cyberattack against a limited number of computers and systems on campus,” Morgan said. “While our teams work with vendors, we are continuing to keep our data center and network down across campus to further protect our systems.”

Some computers on campus were disconnected and isolated, and the campus network was kept offline to investigate the attack. Campus Wi-Fi and email access were also impacted, and people were encouraged to use off-campus computers when possible.

According to an update Morgan sent on July 16, some campus technology systems were still impacted.

Since then, the campus updates on the attack have been removed from the university’s technology website. The website currently says the Office of Information Technology is updating the online portal for students.

Morehead declined to comment further on the scope of the attack when contacted by the Herald-Leader.

Monica Kast
Lexington Herald-Leader
Monica Kast covers higher education for the Herald-Leader and Kentucky.com. Previously, she covered higher education in Tennessee for the Knoxville News Sentinel. She is originally from Louisville, Kentucky, and is a graduate of Western Kentucky University. Support my work with a digital subscription
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