The Axios distance education platform has gone KO following a DDoS-type hacker attack. The service is currently unreachable
No school today: there's a hacker attack. In times of pandemic, coronavirus and distance learning, this also happens. In fact, it's happening right now: the distance learning platform managed by Axios Italia has been hit by a DDoS attack and it is currently blocked.
The company is restoring the system, but for some users it is still impossible to access and login. A message appears on the Axios home page, in which the company apologizes and explains that "unfortunately, since last night our structure is continuously harassed by computer attacks (DDoS type) by hackers. We have blocked this attack thanks to the timely intervention of our technicians and those of Aruba Enterprise, unfortunately the service in the day of today may be altered and not work regularly". Axios also announces that it will report the incident to the Postal Police, so that investigations can be carried out to trace the hacker group that brought the platform to its knees.
Digital School: the Axios platform
The Axios Digital School platform is a complete teledidactic software, which allows the teacher to control e-mail, receive notifications and messages, synchronize the calendar, assign and correct tasks and organize exams. On Scuola Digitale, graphometric signatures are available, necessary, for example, when a substitute teacher has to take up a position, and there is an entire section dedicated to school secretaries as well. All of this is stored in the cloud, on Aruba Enterprise servers.
The DDoS attack on Scuola Digitale
As Axios communicates, the one underway is a DDoS attack, i.e. Distributed Denial of Service. It's a brute force attack, but with low intelligence: it consists in bombarding a site (in this case an entire platform) with millions of access requests. These requests normally come from thousands of devices connected to the Internet previously infected with a virus, to make them a sort of zombie to be used during the attack.
These are the so-called "Botnets" and the ultimate goal of a DDoS attack is to send the site in tilt that, bombarded with requests, can not respond. As a result, therefore, at the moment the platform is blocked but there is no attack in progress on the data of students or school staff.