What Happened to the Internet on October 21st? Did it affect USC?

Yesterday the majority of the North Eastern US, parts of England and some other parts of the Western Hemisphere experienced widespread connection errors with several major websites, such as Twitter, Amazon, Spotify and Netflix. These errors were cased by what is known as a DDOS attack, which is a targeted cyber attack aimed to flood web servers with fake requests, making it very difficult for the servers to satisfy legitimate requests and eventually crashing under the overload of traffic. At this time, we are unsure who is responsible for this attack. (Learn more here: http://usat.ly/2eYPkl3)

If you attempted to access www.uscny.edu on October 21, 2016 between the hours of 12:15pm EST and 4:45pm EST you would have seen a screen saying "your request could not be processed" or something of similar verbiage (depending on your browser). This is due to the fact that the company USC uses to manage our domain name was included in the cyber attack.

That being said, the USC IT Department has gone to great lengths to protect our students' and staff's personal data, as such, we do not store any private information on our web site, and any transmission of personal data is encrypted. So, no matter how you are affiliated with USC, if at all, I want to personally inform you that your data is safe and unaffected by this cyber attack.

If you have any questions, please email our IT Department at usc-it@uscny.edu.

Thank you.

Joseph M. Chevrette II, MBA

Director of Information Technology

USC The Business College

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