Was BARD down because of a DOS attack?

Hi folks,

On an earlier post I was requesting people report to me if they were having an issue with getting to the library of congress web site along with BARD. Shortly after I posted that, I reached out to my cooperating library who confirmed that there was an issue with BARD, and there was no ETA for its return.

On July 20, 2016: on a thread from apple vis entitled Anybody else currently having problems with Bard? which was used to report the last couple of days issues, indicated that the site was recently under a denial of service attack or Denial-of-service attack. (wikipedia)

I want to stress that we do not know if it is true whether BARD was attacked or not. What we do know, is that it would take a lot to take the full Library of Congress sites down, and the full loc.gov domain was down during BARD’s outage. I personally could not get to BARD or the Library of Congress.

According to the Wikipedia article, it says: “In computing, a denial-of-service (DoS) attack is an attempt to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users, such as to temporarily or indefinitely interrupt or suspend services of a host connected to the Internet.[1] A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) is where the attack source is more than one, often thousands of, unique IP addresses. It is analogous to a group of people crowding the entry door or gate to a shop or business, and not letting legitimate parties enter into the shop or business, disrupting normal operations.

Criminal perpetrators of DoS attacks often target sites or services hosted on high-profile web servers such as banks, credit card payment gateways. Motives of revenge, blackmail[2][3][4] or activism[5] can be behind other attacks.”

We do not know if anyone has taken responsibility for any type of DDOS attack, or whether this was the case at all. We do know that BARD will go offline from July 29th through August 1st for scheduled maintenance. The post is to the books blog where I also have a podcast when time allows. I felt to post the announce from BARD there in case people don’t have access to the site, and need to get info to friends or family.

I wish people would be careful when saying the site was down because of a DOS attack, as if it turns out it wasn’t, it may look bad for the person, and then they’re not credable. For example, someone posted to the thread saying: “It was a denial of service attack that caused the outage. Luckily, Bard is
back and all is fine. Just keep in mind that if the site goes down, it’s
nothing anyone is doing, it’s not you or anyone else doing something to
cause bard to go down. I’m glad it’s back too.” A DOS is caused by someone sending traffic to the server that holds BARD or the library of congress. This comment commenting on the subject of the last few days says: “Actually, a denial of service does mean that someone is attacking the site.
That’s the point of a DOS attack, though why anyone would target BARD is beyond me. Talk about childish. Never fear though, there’s no way to accidentally do this and it takes many machines coordinated by a group to even try to hit a system as large as the Library of Congress.” I think this poster is absolutely correct. A script kitty wouldn’t be able to do that, this has to be a large scale attack to take down the whole network.

Maybe the library of congress will post something about what happened, maybe we won’t find out. I’m hopeful that people realize that attacking the library of congress has large implecations that effect a large community including the disabled community who uses the library of congress which provides books in recorded and other formats to print disabled patrons who qualify for the service in the United States and abroad where the patron is abroad either permanently or living there now.

The comment boards await any comments if anyone has any thoughts.