We thank you for your patience this week as we were made aware that some users have been unable to access our website. While most of you were able to access the site as usual, many of you were not, and we realize how frustrating that was for you and your students.
Rest assured that we have been doing everything in our power to bring back the website for all users as soon as possible! However, because our website was not “down,” it has taken a little while to figure out what is going on. We contacted our website support team as well our hosting company, neither of which could identify any direct issues with the site.
Through some helpful tracing information sent to us by users not able to access the website, we were able to determine that we are experiencing what we believe is a DDoS attack, or a “Distributed Denial of Service Attack.” This attack is a cybercrime in which the attacker floods a server with internet traffic to prevent users from accessing connected online services and sites. This caused our site to be blacklisted by some Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and then unable to be accessed by users.
We are taking measures to ensure this does not happen again, and we have engaged the services of a company to fix the issue at hand and provide additional security to prevent things like this from happening in the future.
Again, we thank you for your patience and apologize for the inconvenience as we are working through this!
Jo Dee Soles
Ron Paul Curriculum