Leading American University shuts down its internet over hacker threat

The Penn State University College of Engineering has cut its connection to the internet in response to hackers breaching its systems on two separate occasions, and in one case, the attack was traced to a group of state-sponsored hackers in China.

While announcing the attack, the school also said it had hired the services of Mandiant, the incident response division of computer security firm FireEye, to help in the investigations of the breach and to help recover affected systems.

“In a coordinated and deliberate response by Penn State, the College of Engineering’s computer network has been disconnected from the Internet and a large-scale operation to securely recover all systems is under way,” executive vice president and provost at Penn State," Nicholas P. Jones, said in a statement.

The outage is expected to last for several days according to the provost. The school’s website is also unavailable.

Penn State is one the most influential academic research institutions in the U.S. and has ties to several private companies and the U.S. Department of Defense. Typically, the target of China’s state-sponsored hackers has been data that can be useful to Chinese companies, including product designs, results of research and the email of high-ranking executives.