The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) has postponed the start of its fall semester by three days following a cyberattack that targeted its academic network over the weekend. Classes, originally scheduled to commence on Wednesday, August 19, will now begin on Monday, August 24. UTSA, one of Texas's largest universities, serves over 42,000 students.
According to a statement from Andrea Marks, Senior Executive Vice President of Enterprise Operations and Strategy and Chief Operating Officer, and Michael Schnabel, CTO, the attempted intrusion was detected at the network's perimeter, preventing it from reaching core systems. University Technology Solutions (UTS), collaborating with external incident response specialists, initiated containment measures.
As of their latest update, Marks and Schnabel stated that their investigation has not uncovered any evidence of university data exfiltration. They characterized their response as effective, though they did not elaborate on the nature of the attempted intrusion or identify potential perpetrators.
To facilitate a comprehensive network review and strengthen defenses, UTSA temporarily took certain systems and services offline. This precautionary measure led to disruptions for students, faculty, and staff, including outages of the university phone system and delays with the password reset tool.
University President Taylor Eighmy explained that the decision to delay the semester start was made to ensure all essential university systems, technology, and services are fully operational. He emphasized that the additional time allows teams to meticulously restore services and prepare the university community for a robust start to the semester. Eighmy reiterated that the university responded to attempted unauthorized activity and proactively took systems offline out of an abundance of caution to evaluate the technology environment and reinforce safeguards.
