Expensive and Painful Cyber Attacks Right now it is Brown University -- in the past, it has been small towns in RI and hospital groups. The cyberattack has forced the school to shut some systems down — in an event that Brown is calling an “utmost priority.” Jack Wrenn, a fifth-year doctoral candidate, said that official information was still “frustratingly scant” as of Wednesday night. Wrenn provided a timeline as to what he understood transpired, and when the university community was notified. “Systems appear to have gone down at 7:19 a.m. [on Tuesday],” said Wrenn. “At 7:24 a.m., Computing & Information Services (CIS) announced that they were 'experiencing a major outage of services running in the Brown datacenter.'"