RMIT University races to recover from cyber attack before students return

Academic staff have been instructed to defer their planned return to campus this week and keep working from home.

“To allow RMIT to focus on essential restoration activities, the majority of staff have been asked to work remotely for now,” the university told staff this week.

The cyber attack has also disrupted the university’s efforts to secure a number of late-enrolling students.

“Enrolment online is currently unavailable,” staff were told.

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“Student recruitment teams have proactively reached out to students who have an offer from RMIT and who have not completed the enrolment process.”

The university has also had to delay paying casual staff due to the corruption of an electronic payment system.

Rhidian Thomas, an industrial officer with the National Tertiary Education Union, said his office had been inundated with calls from unpaid casual staff.

“Our phone has been going off with casual staff being unable to generate online pay claims,” Mr Thomas said.

The university said students would be taught through a mixture of online lectures and on-campus tutorials next week.

“RMIT has made significant progress in restoring access to the majority of IT systems that were affected by an outage last week,” an RMIT spokeswoman said.

“We are looking forward to welcoming our higher education students when they commence their semester one studies next week.”

But one RMIT lecturer, speaking anonymously because he is not authorised to speak to the media about employment issues, said there was uncertainty about how next week’s lectures would take place.

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“We’re trying to start teaching next week,” the lecturer said.

“We’re going to be teaching online for our first week because we can’t be guaranteed access to the campus and for many students, they’re in limbo.”

RMIT’s orientation week, usually one of the liveliest in the university calendar, went ahead despite the IT woes, albeit with a smaller, “COVID-safe” crowd.

All the usual O-Week antics were on view at the city campus on Thursday: student political groups trying to sign up first-year students, tote bags of freebies along with DJ and band performances.

But students said they were still unable to access the university’s Wi-Fi, apply for concession cards or enrol in some subjects.

Business information systems student Harsh, 21, who didn’t wish to use his surname, said he was hoping the IT incident wouldn’t mean a return to online learning for his course.

“I’ve got three subjects that are completely related to IT, so if it doesn’t get sorted by the end of this week it’s going to be very hard for me,” he said.

“I just hope they don’t send us back home and for a couple of weeks we have to go back to online studies – I can’t take more of it.”