Cyber Incident Victim: Western New Mexico University

On April 132025 the information technology staff at Western New Mexico University detected a cyberattack that immediately disrupted a range of campus digital services. The attack rendered the university’s public website unreachable, knocked out the campus telephone system, and blocked faculty and student access to the Canvas learning management platform as well as to other academic materials hosted online. According to a message sent the following day by Provost Jack Crocker, who was also serving as the university’s acting president, the incident was attributed to a foreign hacking group that had breached the institution’s networks. Crocker noted that IT staff had activated protective protocols that remained in place and that the university was receiving ongoing support from the New Mexico Higher Education Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Albuquerque office, and other university‑based cybersecurity experts in an effort to contain and remediate the intrusion.

Crocker’s message also announced that a meeting would be held for faculty and staff to provide an update on the situation and to answer questions about the ongoing disruption. The meeting was scheduled for the morning after the message was sent, and Mario Sanchez, the university’s assistant vice president of marketing and communications, confirmed in a subsequent email to the press that the session would cover how faculty could continue to access online learning systems such as Canvas and Zoom, as well as give an update on finals week procedures, grade submission processes, and the commencement ceremony set for Friday, May 9 at 5 p.m. Sanchez emphasized that the university intended to proceed with commencement as scheduled despite the technical difficulties.

In his communications, Sanchez stated that while work continued to restore full access to all web‑based systems, the university could not provide a definitive timeline for when normal operations would resume. He reported that critical and online learning systems had been made active and available to students, and that the university had partnered with WNM Communications to establish internet hot spots on both the Silver City campus and the Smith Learning Center in Deming. These hot spots were intended to give students and faculty high‑speed Wi‑Fi access so they could continue coursework and administrative tasks while the primary network remained impaired. Sanchez also noted that the university was leveraging additional channels—including text messaging, email, and social media—to keep the campus community informed about developments and to guide users toward available resources.

Posts on Western New Mexico University’s Facebook and Instagram accounts revealed that many students continued to experience difficulties accessing Canvas and university email even after the hot spots were deployed. Comments dated as recently as Tuesday indicated that links and assistance provided by the institution were not functioning for some users, leading to frustration and concerns about falling behind in coursework. One student, Sam Vigil, wrote on a Tuesday morning post that he lived out of town and could not come to campus for help, stating that the links and assistance sent to him did not work and that he felt the situation was setting students up for failure. Another commenter, Laura Aubrey, a Silver City business owner enrolled in virtual social work courses, described her own attempts to obtain information by calling the university’s IT department. Aubrey reported that when she initially called and asked politely whether the person answering could answer questions about the outage, the employee became irritated and eventually hung up. When she called back and requested to speak with a supervisor, she was told that the supervisor had no answers at that time and, when she indicated she wished to file a complaint against the earlier employee, the supervisor said he would handle it but did not ask for any of her details. Aubrey also said that contacting the president’s office yielded no information, and she noted that other students had reported similar experiences of being unable to obtain clear guidance from university officials.

Aubrey further explained that some of her professors had only recently regained access to Canvas, a few days before her comments, and that while she could bypass the Canvas portal to reach certain course materials, many of her online classes relied on third‑party sites such as online textbooks, quiz platforms, or supplemental resources that remained inaccessible. She expressed worry that the inability to reach those external tools would prevent her and classmates from completing assignments before the end of the semester, potentially resulting in zeros that could substantially affect final grades despite her otherwise strong performance. Aubrey mentioned that one professor had indicated that a grade appeal process existed after the semester, but she characterized it as a lengthy procedure requiring committee review and anticipated a large volume of such requests if the outage persisted.

The disruption also affected Aldo Leopold Charter School, which occupies Ritch Hall on the Western New Mexico University campus. Hannah Wecks, the school’s director, said that the main office phone was operating via a Wi‑Fi hot spot and that staff were using personal phones for communication. She acknowledged that Western New Mexico University’s IT department had been helpful and that WNM Communications had installed a dedicated line for the charter school at no charge, restoring some connectivity. Wecks noted that the charter school was in the midst of computer‑based testing and that Silver Consolidated Schools had assisted by allowing juniors to take SAT examinations at Silver High School. She added that English classes working on research projects had been forced to use the Miller Library’s limited internet and, when that proved insufficient, to walk to the public library to continue their work. Despite these challenges, Wecks said she was impressed that the university had managed to maintain operations and referenced a prior ransomware incident at New Mexico Highlands University that had been detected on April 3 2024, resulting in a two‑week class cancellation, as well as a 2019 ransomware event at the same institution.

The article places the Western New Mexico University attack within a broader pattern of recent cyber incidents in the region. It notes that Silver Schools had thwarted an attack in July by physically disconnecting their servers from the internet upon detection, that the New Mexico Law Offices of the Public Defender had been victimized by a cyberattack in the same month, and that the Aztec Municipal School District had experienced a breach in February. These references are provided solely to contextualize the WNMU event within the local threat landscape and are drawn directly from the source material. No additional interpretation, opinion, or recommendation is included beyond the facts presented in the article.