The City of Oklahoma says its website was the victim of a second denial-of-service, or DOS attack, in as many days early Wednesday morning.
At 7:44 a.m. the city tweeted its website was down, so KGOU reached out via the social media platform.
@kgounews Yes, another attack was launched this morning at approximately 6:40 a.m.
— City of OKC (@cityofokc) March 18, 2015
Zach Nash is a creative manager for the City. He said they were being hit from Russia, China, and the United States by hundreds of computers infected by bots designed to send so much information to a network or a server that legitimate web traffic is blocked.
"There was a Twitter account that said they were taking responsibility for it. They didn't say why they were," Nash said.
Oklahoma City IT staff is working to get software installed to block any future attacks.
"With the security world, there's nothing that's foolproof, but we're trying to take steps to prevent this from happening again," Nash said.
So far there’s no evidence residents’ personal or confidential information was accessed.
"Right now we know that it was a denial-of-service attack, which is different from a hack," Nash said. "But we are monitoring that traffic and making sure, and if we do find out that happened, we will let people know as quickly as possible and take steps to mitigate that."
-----------------------------------------
KGOU is a community-supported news organization and relies on contributions from readers and listeners to fulfill its mission of public service to Oklahoma and beyond. Donate online, or by contacting our Membership department.
