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Southeastern Louisiana University computer systems down, police investigating

If it was a cyberattack, students aren’t sure why SLU would be a target.

HAMMOND, La. — Louisiana cyber security teams are working with state police to bring the computer network at Southeastern Louisiana University back online.

Friday afternoon, the school took down the system after noticing some sort of “network incident.”

Students on the SLU campus in Hammond are adjusting to life without the university computer network.

“Just not being able to do our assignments, prepare for exams, just being worried I guess about how we would turn things in, study and just being able to do things on time,” SLU graduate student Aleigh Sanders.

“I don’t think I realized how much we actually rely on the internet until this happened,” SLU Sophomore Ollie Diamini said.

State police and the governor’s Office of Homeland Security are now investigating a possible cyber threat.

“Late last week our technology staff determined there was a possible incident in the system,” SLU spokesman Mike Revault said. “At this point, our email system is partially up, everything, those other things that went down are still down.”

Internet service on campus, the Southeastern website and online class system “Moodle” were still offline as of Tuesday afternoon.

“Some assignments were due on Saturday, of course it went down on Friday, so we weren’t even able to study and work on some assignments,” SLU senior Brett Monistere said. “Of course, with emails being down, you didn’t know what was happening.”

Friday, some students living on campus couldn’t get into their dorms.

“My (swipe) card wasn’t working to give me access into my student building as well as yesterday it wasn’t working to allow us to get food,” Diamini said.

If it was a cyber-attack, students aren’t sure why SLU would be a target.

“You never think of these things happening to anybody or anything around you happening like this,” Monistere said. “For it to happen here it’s eye opening.”

Revault says it’s unclear when all systems will be back online.

“I know that no system will come on until it’s safely able to come on.”

Revault couldn’t say whether any personal information may have been compromised during the network incident.

LSU also reported some internet outages Monday afternoon.

The computer problems there have since been resolved.

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