By Courtney Cole /Delta Staff Writer 

Victims of a distributed denial-of-service attack, Missouri Valley College students discovered they were unable to access the internet for much of Labor Day.

Cut off from Netflix and Hulu, students were also unable to do their homework on Brightspace. 

A DDOS attack bombards a computer system with information requests eventually causing it to overload. 

Jason Rinne, Systems Administrator for the Office of Information Technology at Missouri Valley College, became aware of the occurrence around 8:30 a.m. when service outages began to be reported on campus. Rinne was able to determine the problem wasn’t with Valley’s equipment, but rather that IP addresses owned by the college’s internet service provider were under attack.

The ISP was able to remove the block by 3:30 p.m. on the same day and chose to monitor the connection for the rest of the day.

Kenneth Crenshaw, a current student at Missouri Valley College, was one of those affected by the service attack. He said the blockage meant he was not able to do any of his assignments because of the loss of connection to Brightspace. 

Fellow student Bailey Emman was not able to watch Disney Plus due to the attack. Not knowing that an attack was happening, he tried to close out of the application and try again, but nothing he did was successful. 

Missouri Valley College continues to protect its users and their information to the best of its ability. Fortunately, incidents like this one are rare.

“In my 15 years, I have only seen one or two DDOS attacks and those were not on the same scale as this,” Rinne said.