The Jan. 8 edition of The News included an article and editorial regarding ResNet, our residence hall networking service. In the article, a number of students expressed their justified dissatisfaction with recent ResNet network outages. The article and editorial also stated that I consider the current service as “the best it can be.” This is absolutely false.

ResNet is one of Information Services’ most valued and important services and, as noted in the balance of the article, we are taking significant actions and making significant investments to improve the service with the clear objective of achieving and maintaining 100 percent availability. Anything short of that objective is unacceptable and we will continue to do everything we can to make 100 percent a reality.

The majority of our current ResNet outages are being caused by “denial of service” attacks. This occurs when a particular workstation floods the network causing the exclusion of legitimate traffic. This can be caused by a virus, a workstation being compromised by someone on the Internet or, on rare occasion, intentionally by the owner of the workstation at Northeastern.

As a major university, Northeastern is bombarded every day with thousands of denial of service attacks which we successfully prevent from negatively effecting the network. Unfortunately, an occasional attack occurs which results in an outage. In those cases, our technical team must manually stop the attack and re-establish service working around the clock, often in the middle of the night. After the network is back online, our team analyzes the attack in question and takes all possible corrective action to prevent that type of attack from succeeding in the future. This is a continual process given the number of new viruses, denial of service programs, and other hostile activity created daily on the Internet. In the past few weeks, we have seen a marked increase in the number and effectiveness of these attacks and they are the primary causes of our recent outages.

We will continue, on a 24/7 basis, to monitor, protect and support ResNet as an essential service. Our objective, as always, is to deliver fast, secure and reliable networking services with 100 percent availability. We apologize for inconveniences.

-Bob Weir, Vice President for

Information Services