#JLUoffline: Important digital functions will be restored once teaching is resumed after the Christmas break

Good news for teachers and students of the Justus Liebig University Gießen (JLU) after two weeks of a busy Christmas break: With the restoration of important IT components, lectures and other teaching operations will be significantly normalised within the coming days and weeks after the first challenging phase of #JLUoffline. The teaching platform Stud.IP will be back in operation on Monday, 6 January 2020. Teachers and students will, thus, be able to reaccess digital teaching and learning materials. Those students and employees who have personally collected their new password prior to the Christmas break will be able to log in to Stud.IP again from Monday, 6 January 2020. Merely lecture and seminar recordings will be made available at a later point in time.

Prior to Christmas, the JLU administration was already able to distribute around 60% of the new passwords to all employees and students. From 13 January 2020 onwards, all those who have not yet collected their new passwords will be welcome to do so; further details will follow in a separate announcement on 10 January 2020. For those members of the JLU who do not have the opportunity to collect their passwords in person - for instance due to a longer stay abroad - a legally secure alternative is to be prepared together with the DFN (“German Research Network”).

From this coming Monday onwards, the JLUBox – JLU’s cloud platform – can again be used in addition to the teaching platform Stud.IP. Furthermore, the digital systems of the university library and the exam management system FlexNow will be available again soon. The use of these IT components should be made possible during the lecture week starting 13 January 2020.

Access to digital services via devices within the JLU network as well as full access to the internet will only be gradually possible for individual JLU network segments in the following weeks; this process will also begin in the week of 13 January 2020.

The complete JLU website will already be back online at www.uni-giessen.de next Monday, 6 January 2020. Nevertheless, the information on #JLUoffline will still be available. It should, however, be noted that for the time being the decentralised institutions cannot yet update their homepages. Presumably, it will take a few more days until all the information - for example on re-registration deadlines (Rückmeldefristen) - is up to date.

As there is still considerable structural damage to be repaired in a number of IT components, the JLU crisis management team would like to point out that not all data on the internal Windows drives (winfiles) will be accessible to lecturers, students and administrative staff until February 2020. However, it is also worth noting that the early shutdown of all JLU servers on 8 December 2019 has made it possible to protect all scientific data and the administration's databases.

JLU President Prof. Dr. Joybrato Mukherjee said: "A month ago, our university fell victim to a vile criminal attack. In order to eliminate the consequences of this cyber attack as quickly as possible, the staff of the IT Service Centre and many other JLU facilities have sacrificed their Christmas break. I would like to thank everyone for their commitment."