Amid cyberattack, ‘access to nothing’
A lot fewer laptops and smartphones.
A bit more chess, pool and cornhole. That was the scene at the New Mexico Highlands University student union April 4, the day after the first signs of a cyberattack that has hobbled the school’s services for the past week and a half, junior Cody Rivera said.
“It was so quiet,” said Rivera, 20, who serves as the university’s student regent. “Students come up to me saying, ‘There’s nothing to do because everything’s so reliant on Wi-Fi.’ ... There was a lot of kids in our game room that were playing pool and, like, chess and playing cornhole. But other than that, there was really nothing else to do.”
Of course, the lack of internet-based entertainment is far from the worst problem posed by the ransomware attack, the second to hit the Las Vegas, N.M., institution in the last five years. For more than a week now, classes have been canceled while staff work to restore systems.
The university issued a statement Wednesday saying classes are canceled through Sunday. That information is still up to date, university spokesman David Lepre told The New Mexican in an email Friday.
Lepre said university leaders plan to meet Sunday to determine what comes next.
Rivera, who is studying business administration with a concentration in management, said in his Wednesday morning business research class April 3, he and his classmates were able to log onto Zoom, but the instructor had no access to the course material. A couple of hours later, though, in his human resource management course, other students couldn’t get onto Zoom or into the learning management system.
“We were kind of just there,” Rivera said. “We had access to nothing, so we were just kind of like, ‘OK, we’ll see what happens and where it takes us.’ ”
Rivera said students and faculty have been mostly unable to get to work stored online.
“It kind of puts people in a tight spot because nobody has access ... unless you had your stuff hard-copied, which
is very rare nowadays,” he said.
Rivera said his girlfriend, a senior in the university’s high-profile and “pretty intensive” social work program, was unsure how to get her coursework done last week before the school announced it was canceling classes. “She had a lot of assignments that were holding off, and so she was like, ‘What’s going to happen?’ ” Rivera said.
The university has said it doesn’t plan to extend classes beyond their scheduled end date and instead has committed to “work with each class to determine the best path forward for class completion” after classes come back online.
Bill García, chairman of the university’s board of regents, said Friday it’s worrisome cyberattacks are getting more and more common.
“Of course we always get concerned any time we have to cancel class,” García said. “Look at the damage that happens here. It drains resources. It deprives students of class time, and it just disrupts everything.”
As for Rivera, he said he had planned to miss classes this week anyway. He and seven other members of the New Mexico Highlands University Legislative Fellowship program traveled to Washington, D.C., for several days with faculty members and administrators to attend a Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities conference and meet with lawmakers.
“It kind of worked out, though, I’m not going to lie,” Rivera said, laughing. “Some of the students that were on the trip were like, ‘OK, well at least we didn’t miss out on class.’ But that’s only seven students out of our whole shebang.”
García said the university has gotten robust support from Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s office, the New Mexico Department of Information Technology and New Mexico Higher Education Secretary Stephanie Rodriguez since the attack.
“The good thing is everybody in the state is responding in helping Highlands,” García said. “So we’re going to get it fixed as soon as possible here.”