The Lincoln Lion Tales website fell victim to an attack! Tuesday, May 26, around 2 PM the servers of Lincoln’s favorite online newspaper fell victim to a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. An attack like this temporarily shuts down a webpage and nobody can access it until the issue is solved.

Here is some background information about a DDoS attack. SNO support, Jason Wallestad, sent Lion Tales an email in which he described the attack like this: “A DDoS attack is a method used to make a website, server, or network unavailable by the means of flooding the server with an extremely large number of requests. This causes the server or network to become overloaded and become unresponsive for all visitors. A simple way of describing this event is having 10,000 people attempt to all enter through a single doorway at the same time. Getting through will be slow going, and may even stop due to too many people getting stuck in the opening.”  SNO stands for School Newspapers Online, which is the host of our site, lincolnliontales.com.

After being offline for over two hours, the Lion Tales website was back online at 4:40 PM on May 26. Luckily, no permanent damage was done and all information on the website was saved. Usually an attack like this does not cause any damage that affects the page after the attack is over. But it is still a shock for the people who run the site.

Another important fact is that two classes are using the Lion Tales website to grade their students: the Journalism class, taught by Mr. Alpers, which is responsible for the major content, and the Translation and Interpretation class taught by Señora Straus. She was one of the first people that noticed the website was down. When Lion Tales asked her how she noticed something was wrong, she told us that “checking Lion Tales is one of my hobbies. In addition, I needed to grade the last assignments and articles of the Translation and Interpretation class. I noticed that the site was down and after a couple attempts I messaged Mr. Alpers.”

We still do not know why Lion Tales fell victim to such an attack. Even SNO support had no idea. It is also unclear who is responsible. Jason Wallestad told us in the same email, “people start these types of attacks for any number of reasons. These type of attacks are generally meant to temporarily disable a website that someone doesn’t like or finds offensive. It can also just be due to them being bored and having nothing better to do.”