On registration day at 11:59am, all new students’ index fingers were stuck on the computer mouse, aggressively clicking the refresh button in hope that they will be the first to squeeze themselves into this semester’s classes. This act exhausted the AUBsis (Student Information System) during registration to the extent that the system had to retaliate.

By 12:01 pm, students were running around, trying to race into a functioning computer, but to no avail, for there was nothing wrong with the PC units. It was AUBsis that had crashed down. The system remained overloaded for almost 90 minutes. How did it happen? Director of Computing and Networking Services Nabil Bukhalid told Outlook that the most significant factor contributing to the disruption of the system was high rates of simultaneous registration requests (or refresh submit), which was not experienced before. “The analyses of the registration log files revealed that on September 15, between noon and 2:00pm (the first two hours of registration) 1,091 students had registered generating 155,674 transactions to do, which is an abnormally high number of transactions,” he said. “Further analysis revealed that 78 students alone generated 69,774 transactions within the first 120 minutes (around 50 percent of the total transactions). Twenty one of those students generated 26.3 registration requests per minute which is humanly impossible,” said Bukhalid.

Further information received from the Registrar’s Office showed that some students had used macros and scripts, programs that have the power to manipulate the registration process.

“The difference between macros and scripts is that script is a small program that you write which will simulate the web screen submission (submit format). The macro is a program that will fill in the data and it acts as if you are typing on the keyboard but electronically,” Bukhalid argued.

Students using macros had to wait for the time allocated for registration, but their advantage was macro’s rapid way of refreshing the webpage. According to Bukhalid, “the student will be able to repeat quickly using the macro if he/she fails to take a course rather than doing the refresh using the finger. The program will do the refresh electronically”.

Macro is easily created within word or excel. “You can build a macro using any Microsoft application,” said Bukhalid. “They put the system down. This was a denial of service to others. And there is no equity in that.”

Ramsey Nasser, one of the Computer Science Department students who is aware of such programs said that outsmarting AUBsis this way is like shooting oneself in the foot. “Attacking AUBsis isn’t very smart. To access it you need to log on and once you log on they can trace you and they can know who you are. Violators can be easily identified in the records,” he said.

According to Ramsey, students either do it in order to see if there were capacity in classes. “Sometimes they simply do it maliciously. It’s a type of attack called DOS (Denial Of Service) attack. Some students do that just to shut down the system.”

Bukhalid will not allow the system abusers to dodge from punishment. He believes these students have violated the seventh code of AUBnet Code of Conduct, which punishes any trial of tampering with or obstructing “the operation of AUBnet computing systems in any way, including disproportionate use of computer resources that hinders access to other users.”

Bukhalid feels strongly against these violations. “This is a service that was provided to the whole community. We will make sure that somebody abusing the registration system is going to receive the exit from AUB. I’m being extremely, extremely, extremely serious about this issue. We will make sure that the ones who did it will suffer badly; and I’m serious when saying badly.”

But do students really read the codes? “Nobody reads the agreement,” said Nasser. “If AUB is serious about these rules and the enforcement of the Codes of Conduct, then they should make them more known. Maybe put them near computers as a reminder, or put them on the front page of AUBsis. ”

For his part, Bu khalid wonders. “Do you inform someone that stealing is not permitted? Do you inform him that you can’t break a door’s lock?”

He added: “If students’ attitude is like this, then we shouldn’t care since we brought the system back in one hour. But we care only because other students were victims. It took us around 90 minutes to detect those abusers, to write the codes and block them. During those 90 minutes, students suffered. Our responsibility is to protect the rest of the students.”

The list of students who abused the AUBsis is in the process of being finalized.

According to Bukhalid, 29 students were abusing the system and causing suffering to 1,900 students. He gave no further details. Names will remain confidential and will be reported to the Provost for appropriate disciplinary action.

On enhancing the security of the system, he said: “We paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for the system. But any system could be abused. We would like to let students try things. We can raise the security of the system to a level that would make everything challenging and impossible to everyone. But we don’t do that. This is not outsmarting. I can block all the portables, would AUB students be happy?”