All campus users lost Internet access starting at 4:55 p.m. Thursday, Computing and Information Services reported.
The service interruption was due to "malicious traffic originating from a host within our dormitory network," according to Timothy Thorp, manager of communications and education for CIS.
Malicious traffic is the type of Internet traffic that a typical human user would be unable to create, such as an extremely large volume of data transferred at one time by a spammer, according to Thorp.
The malicious traffic obstructed campus connection to the Internet. CIS officials thought they had resolved the problem at 5:20 p.m. when they "filtered the malicious host," meaning that they blocked the offending computer from access to the network, Thorp told The Herald.
CIS has no way of knowing the origin of the malicious traffic, Thorp said, though he noted that someone's computer likely fell victim to a virus.
After CIS officials blocked the malicious host, students in dorm rooms continued to report network problems to the CIS Help Desk. Thorp said this problem was related to Internet traffic passing through the Domain Name Server. The DNS has to do with the way Internet pages are called up, Thorp said, so this problem would have affected the browsing of Web sites but perhaps not other Internet traffic, such as IPTV.
Patrick Hanley '09, who lives in Slater Hall, said his Internet connection was down for two-and-a-half hours, starting at around 5 p.m. He said the outage was "just annoying" and that he needed the Internet to use MyCourses to study for a midterm.
Campus Internet access was restored by 8 p.m.
