Hackers attempt to sabotage Ucas system

Computer hackers tried to sabotage the Ucas website just hours before thousands of students received their A’ Level results.

Withington Independent Girls School pupils receive their A level exam results in Manchester

The official admissions body, which is responsible for processing exam grades and organising the clearing system of university and college places, admitted that the “criminal and sustained” attempt to crash the site could have caused huge disruption.

Mary Curnock Cook, chief executive of Ucas, said: "The incident was contained very, very quickly and no personal data was released to anybody.

"Really we were pretty upset that anybody would think of disrupting such an important day for so many people who are getting their A-level results and finding out whether they are going to university.

"Thankfully it was all contained and everything is working 100 per cent normally today."

The organisation's website went down for an hour on Wednesday evening as hackers in the Asia-Pacific region made the "denial of service" attack.

However, it was back online in time for the listings to go live at midnight and no personal information was compromised.

Students were given access to the site from 8am on Thursday in a bid to search for places.

Mrs Curnock Cook, speaking at the organisation's headquarters in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, attributed the hackers’ failure to advanced new systems for storing data.

She added: "This year we have made a step-change in our technology arrangements and most of our critical services are deployed in the cloud, which gives us massive resilience.”

The police have been informed and are investigating.

Ucas, the University and Colleges Admissions Service, is advertising 30,000 course vacancies in clearing.