UA websites timing out or being slow
Problem Impact Analysis
Event Occurrence: 4/7/24
Perimeter firewalls employ protective measures when UA is targeted with anomalous floods of network traffic. These protective measures can include dropping traffic from the offending host as well as an overall degradation of network performance.
On April 7th, 2024 at shortly after 4:30am, OIT Networking received initial reports of connectivity issues when trying to access www.uaf.edu, www.alaska.edu, www.gina.alaska.edu and www.gi.alaska.edu.
UA websites should remain functional and respond in a timely manner at all times.
Investigation by OIT Networking and Security Operations indicated an unusually high number of new connections being simultaneously made into the UAF network. This condition engaged the firewall’s threat response, which began limiting traffic into the network.
This type of traffic condition is fairly anomalous; identification and containment of problem sources is one measure that can be taken as well as securing configurations of external interfaces.
OIT Networking and Security Operations are assessing the business impact of adjusting the threshold for external threat protection. No action has been taken at this time.
Should further incidents of this nature occur in the future, the stance regarding adjusting the protection thresholds may be review