RMIT claims ‘significant progress’ in bouncing back from Friday’s IT outage

February 22, 2021 TH Author

Melbourne’s RMIT University has said significant progress has been made in restoring its systems, following reports on Friday the university had fallen victim to a phishing attack.

“RMIT has made significant progress in restoring access to many of the IT systems that were affected by an outage last week,” an RMIT spokesperson said on Monday.

“On-campus classes are proceeding as scheduled and we look forward to welcoming students to a range of orientation activities on campus this week.”

RMIT staff will continue to work remotely to “make it easier for restoration activities to continue at pace”, however.

Need to disclose a breach? Read this: Notifiable Data Breaches scheme: Getting ready to disclose a data breach in Australia

RMIT took to Twitter on Thursday at 9:45pm AEDT to inform students its IT services team was working to resolve issues that had impacted access to some of the university’s supported applications and systems. 

The university on Friday morning had cancelled in-person classes. RMIT said this would allow it to resolve the issues as quickly as possible and ensure students were still provided with access to the systems they need.

Following reports the outage was a result of a “significant cyber attack”, RMIT said on Friday at 5pm AEDT there was no evidence to suggest a breach.

“From the analysis undertaken to date, which has been independently validated, there is currently no evidence to suggest any data breaches as a result of these issues,” it said.

“RMIT staff will continue to work remotely, with access to critical systems including Office 365 and Canvas.”

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