This summer, Eastern web server users have experienced frequent slow downs while connecting to the Internet because of excessive hits from foreign sites.

“We had approximately15,000 compromised systems, from outside the United States, hitting the main web server last weekend, generating a couple of million hits on the system,” said Greg DeYoung, associate director for campus infrastructure technology.

These hits from foreign sites are common occurrences and in Eastern’s case, the hits were aimed at an on-line class discussion forum.

“[It] was the target of an overwhelming flood of web hits called a Denial of Service attack,” said Mihir ‘Chat’ Chatterji, assistant vice president of Information Technology Services.

The Denial of Service attack means that users of the service were denied access to the targeted system, DeYoung said. The targeted system is forced to shut down due to the flood of incoming messages, which denies service to legitimate users.

The problem of excessive web hits can be fixed by two means: contacting the source of which the attacks are coming from or to block the source.

However, because the hits were from foreign sites, ITS choose the latter.

“In this case, the attacks were coming from foreign sites and therefore much more difficult to contact or get cooperation from,” Chatterji said. “We therefore had to [in] effect, block them.”

Since the foreign sites were blocked, it caused slow downs with the server as well as outages.

“This took time and the internet connection to the outside world had to be shut down for some of this time,” Chatterji said.

There is currently a permanent filter solution in place to prevent this problem from happening again.

Although fixing the problem caused outages, doing something about it is important.

These hits are sometimes used to break into the site, said Fred Seaton, senior system manager for the Western Illinois University.

Western, as well as Eastern, has experienced problems with hits from foreign sites.

This problem is not unusual, Seaton said. However, Western has not experienced any known outages or slow downs because of it.

Southern Illinois University of Carbondale on the other hand is unaware of any recent hits from foreign sites

The university uses a firewall to prevent the attacks since it is a common problem, said Don Olson, director of information technology for SIU-C.

Mostly, the university experiences slow downs from excessive use from students.

Outages occur towards the end of the semester for about two weeks total, Olson said.

To reduce the amount of outages and slow downs, from any cause, ITS has been focusing on improving their web system.

“We have spent a year re-engineering our Internet server system in order to minimize the effects of a single point of failure,” Chatterji said. “We plan to implement it this summer.”