Cyber-attack disrupts phone service
By Terry Murry on Thursday, September 30th, 2021 in Columbia Basin News More Top Stories
WALLA WALLA – A cyber-attack launched earlier this week against Bandwidth, a Raleigh, North Carolina based software-driven communications company, resulted in rolling outages, slowed Internet access and impaired phone services Tuesday in parts of Oregon and Washington, including the city of Walla Walla.
“Bandwidth and a number of critical communications service providers have been targeted by a rolling DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack,” Bandwidth CEO David Morken stated. “While we have mitigated much intended harm, we know some of you have been significantly impacted by this event. For that I am truly sorry. We will not rest until we end this incident and will continue to do all we can to protect against future ones.”
In short, a DDoS attack means hackers have attempted to make a website or computer unavailable by flooding or crashing the website with too much traffic, according to Norton LifeLock Inc., a company which provides cybersecurity software and services.
From about 1:30 p.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday, people were unable to call departments in the cities of College Place, Milton-Freewater, Walla Walla and Columbia County, according to David Dalan, city of Walla Walla network administrator. He explained some people were not able to make 911 calls either.
At 8:22 a.m. Wednesday, Dalan sent a message to city of Walla Walla employees stating, “This issue appears to have resolved itself, at least for the most part.”
Graphic via CC0 Public Domain
