Cyber attack takes down City of Columbia website

A City of Columbia official said the city’s website, gocolumbiamo.com, suffered a cyber attack Wednesday night, and the website will be down until further notice.

Deputy City Manager Tony St. Romaine said Anonymous, a group associated with cyber attacks and hacking activism, took down the city’s website with aDistributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. St. Romaine said the group cited a drug-related SWAT raid in Columbia in 2010, where police shot two dogs in the house.

A YouTube video shows a user taking credit for the attack, along with the SWAT raid from 2010. (Warning: the video contains strong language and graphic content.)

A news release sent Friday morning said the city’s IT department was notified of an attack around 11 p.m. Wednesday. Deputy City Manager Tony St. Romaine told ABC 17 News IT staff worked through the night until 7 a.m. Thursday. The staff left the office, but continued to work from home.

“This form of attack is an attempt to make an online service unavailable by flooding the website server with requests from multiple sources,” the release said. “In most cases, they involve forging of sender addresses so that the location of the attacking machines cannot easily be identified.”

The release said this sort of attack renders city services provided online unavailable, and doesn’t compromise personal information.