14 DAY TRIAL // The website of the city of Columbia, the official government website of Missouri, offered irregular access to its visitors on Thursday morning due to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack from an unknown entity.
No one claimed responsibility of the attack at the moment, which could indicate that the website was used for target practice for owners of DDoS services to demonstrate the power of their network.
Mark Neckerman, information technologies assistant director, said that a large spike of traffic was recorded on Thursday but that the IT department solved the issue, according to Columbia Daily Tribune.
However, at the time of writing the article, the web servers are unresponsive and there is no access to the website.
The current status of the investigation is unclear at the moment, but the situation is similar to an incident that occurred on Christmas Eve, 2014, when the services were not available for a period of three days.
Initially, it was believed that members of the Anonymous hacktivist group initiated the operation but another individual took responsibility, known by the name Bitcoin Baron and who denied any connection to the hacktivists.
The reason was a SWAT operation on their house, which resulted in law enforcement killing two dogs.
It is important to note that although this is a cyber-attack, its only consequence is inability to access the affected services; no loss of information is involved.