The Arctic Cyberattack

The portal for submitting theses and dissertations is unavailable. At UiT The Arctic University of Norway, based in Tromsø, iPortal Munin is among the services disrupted while the university works to contain the attack.

On November 2, Jørgen Fossland, the university’s director of administration, told Norwegian public broadcaster NRK that the attack was still ongoing. Staff were working outside their normal hours, and the university was paying for external advisers.

UiT publicly announced the targeted attack on October 30. Its own service notices trace the disruption to the previous morning.

Intruders reached the servers

By October 31, Fossland had told Norwegian news agency NTB that attackers had entered some servers. Those machines had been taken offline while the university continued defending its infrastructure.

At that stage, he described the known extent of the intrusion as limited. Examinations were unaffected, and investigators had detected no leakage of personal data, he said.

Those findings describe what the university knew on Saturday. On Monday, the recovery timetable remained uncertain.

Fossland has described an attacker with considerable resources. The perpetrator’s identity and motive remain unknown.

Meanwhile, the disruption reaches into ordinary academic work. Ubdigital, the university library’s digital archive and publishing service, is also listed as unavailable. People accessing academic journals from outside the university network must use its secure connection service.

A language service falls silent

Further down the outage list is Jorgal, an online tool developed by UiT’s Giellatekno research group to translate North Sámi into Norwegian.

Its purpose extends beyond university teaching. When UiT launched the translator in 2017, researchers explained that it could help people understand North Sámi texts and make it easier for Sámi speakers to choose their own language when writing.

The university illustrated that purpose with access to debates in Sámi media. Users could translate a webpage, upload a document or paste text into the service.

That history explains part of the present disruption: a university server also supports access to public information across a language barrier.

Giellatekno describes digital language tools as essential to the survival of languages in modern society. Its work connects linguistic research with resources people can use in everyday life.

Jorgal now appears alongside the thesis submission portal on UiT’s outage list. For the services still listed as unavailable, the university gives neither a temporary workaround nor a date for restoration.