Memorial University delays Grenfell Campus classes after ransomware attack

Memorial University of Newfoundland, the largest university in Atlantic Canada, said it identified IT problems at its Grenfell Campus in Corner Brook on December 29, 2023, and confirmed the following day that they stemmed from a cybersecurity incident. It announced the incident publicly on December 31.

The university said an unauthorized third party had gained access to the Grenfell Campus network and encrypted data on a number of servers and workstations, leaving Grenfell IT services unavailable. Memorial's president later confirmed the attack involved ransomware. Systems at the St. John's campus were not affected, although the Marine Institute took its own IT services offline as a precaution.

In-person classes at Grenfell, originally due to resume on January 4, 2024, were pushed back a week and restarted on January 8. Online courses at Grenfell and classes at Memorial's other campuses went ahead as scheduled. The university activated its Emergency Operations Centre, isolated affected systems, engaged external cybersecurity specialists and reported the incident to police, including the RCMP's National Cybercrime Coordination Centre.

In its January updates Memorial said forensic work by its own information technology teams and outside experts, carried out alongside the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, had produced no evidence that any information, personal or otherwise, had been compromised, and it committed to notifying individuals if that changed. The university said full recovery would take several weeks and that some services would look different than before.