Howard University's Ransomware Wake-Up Call
A ransomware attack knocked Howard University's wifi offline for days, another sign campus IT is a soft target in the hybrid-learning era.
Howard University started its fall semester the way way too many institutions have started theirs this year: recovering from a ransomware attack. The historically Black university in Washington, D.C. got hit in early September, and the fallout took down its wifi network campus-wide, disrupting both in-person and online classes for several days while IT staff scrambled to contain it.
If this feels like deja vu, that’s because it is. Universities have become one of the most reliable targets in the current ransomware wave, right alongside hospitals and local government agencies. There’s an obvious pattern here, and it’s worth spelling out plainly: these are all organizations running large, sprawling networks with thousands of devices they don’t fully control, staffed by IT teams that are perpetually underfunded relative to the size of what they’re defending, and serving populations who can’t just “opt out” if systems go down. You can’t tell ten thousand students to simply not log in to class for a week. That leverage is exactly what makes these targets attractive to attackers who are, at the end of the day, running a business optimized around getting paid quickly.
Why campuses specifically
University networks are a security nightmare almost by design. You’ve got dorms full of personal devices connecting to the same infrastructure that runs research labs, financial systems, health records, and learning management platforms. Access needs to be broad because the whole point of a university is open collaboration and inquiry, not a locked-down corporate perimeter. Add in a rotating population of tens of thousands of students who show up every year with new laptops and phones, mostly not managed by any central IT policy, and you have an attack surface that’s almost impossible to fully lock down.
The timing here is especially painful. This is happening right as schools are trying to run hybrid learning models that lean even more heavily on connectivity than pre-pandemic setups did. Wifi isn’t a nice-to-have anymore, it’s the thing that determines whether class actually happens. When it goes down, there’s no simple fallback to “just meet in the room” because half of the room might be logging in remotely anyway.
None of this is new information to anyone working in higher-ed IT, who have been sounding alarms about underinvestment for years. But it does raise the question of whether the current spate of attacks finally forces universities to treat network security as core infrastructure spending rather than a line item that gets trimmed whenever budgets tighten. Ransomware gangs aren’t going to get bored and move on. If anything, the success of these campus attacks over the past year is only going to draw more attention to the sector as an easy mark.
Howard hasn’t said much publicly about what the attackers demanded or whether they paid, which is fairly standard practice for institutions in this position. Worth watching whether more details leak out, and whether other universities gearing up for the semester start taking this as a warning rather than just another headline to scroll past.