The website for the city of Columbia, the official website of the Missouri government ,was providing irregular access to its visitors on Thursday morning, and this was due to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack by an unknown person.
No one has taken responsibility for the attack up to this point, a fact that could mean that this website is being used by the owners of DDoS services to show the strength of their network.
Mark Neckerman, assistant director of information technology, said a large volume of traffic was recorded on Thursday, but that the service was addressing the issue, according to the Columbia Daily Tribune.
However, up until Friday, the web servers were not responding and there was no access to the website.
The current progress of the investigation is unclear at this time, but the incident is similar to an event that occurred on the eve of Christmas 2014, when the services were unavailable for a period of three days.
Initially, it was believed that members of the hacktivist group Anonymous were behind the attack, but another individual claimed responsibility, known as Bitcoin Baron, who denied any connection to the hacktivist group.
It is important to note that although this incident constitutes a cyberattack, its only consequence is the inability to access the services and that no information was lost.
