A potential cyberattack continued for a second day to cause widespread computer system outages at Columbia University on Wednesday as the school’s engineers worked to investigate the problem and restore service.
The attack, which began in the early morning hours on Tuesday, initially shut down all systems on the school’s Morningside campus that required a university ID, including Zoom, internal emails and coursework, according to a Columbia official. By Wednesday, many of those services had been restored, but there were still others, including the main course catalog and library catalogs, that remained unavailable.
An image of a smiling President Trump popped up on some screens across campus on Tuesday, including on public monitors in the lobby of Alfred J. Lerner Hall, a student center, photographs reviewed by The New York Times showed.
But the Columbia official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to speak publicly, said that while the images appeared during the outage, they could not be definitively connected to the broader cyberattack.
The official also said that the school was not aware of any claim of responsibility for the potential attack and that posts by an online group asserting responsibility on Tuesday had been discredited.
Columbia said it had notified local and federal law enforcement agencies about the attack. As of Wednesday, the university official said, there was no evidence that data had been compromised, no indication of ransomware and no sign of a deep incursion into Columbia’s information systems.
The clinical systems at the school’s medical center were not affected, the official said.
American officials have warned of the potential for cyberattacks by Iran following the bombing of its nuclear facilities by the United States last week. There was no indication that this attack was linked to Iran.
Universities have become increasingly common targets of cyberattacks, because their systems house a wealth of personal information and valuable research, and because their large number of users leaves them vulnerable.
A Bank of America report found that cyberattacks against higher education had increased 114 percent between 2020 and 2022. Attacks on educational institutions often involve ransomware, a type of malicious software designed to block access to a computer system until a sum of money is paid, according to a report by Malwarebytes, a cybersecurity firm.
Michael Thaddeus, a Columbia mathematician who was attempting to do some research on Wednesday, called the attack inconvenient and suspicious.
“To find a book, I had to guess whether it would be in Columbia’s holdings and look up its call number at the Library of Congress,” he said. “It raises my eyebrows — I wish I knew who is responsible.”
Sharon Otterman is a Times reporter covering higher education, public health and other issues facing New York City.
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