Lodi Website Knocked Offline By DDoS Attack

LODI (CBS13) – The city of Lodi's website went down on Thursday in an apparent distributed denial of service attack.

"I knew immediately what it was when I looked at it."

When the IT department looked at the server, one computer IP address was pinging the computer, over and over.

"They'll send hundreds of attempts to get on your website all at once, in an effort just to take the site down," said Benjamin Buecher, IT specialist for City of Lodi.

When CBS13 spoke with Lodi's server technician's outdoors, for security reasons, they weren't showing offices or the servers. Lodi's technicians got the upper hand on Thursday, but the attack wasn't over.

"We were able to keep one step ahead of the person, but they started doing a distributed disruption of service, attacking us from multiple directions," said Buecher.

It's a disruption of service attack network technician Mark Beaver has seen before. His work at Merino Computers Concepts is to protect large companies from these types of cyber-attacks.

IT experts said it's not uncommon for hackers to tap into personal computers to us their IP address in attacks.

To protect your personal computer from attacks Beaver said, " You'll want to have anti-virus software installed and maintained on your computer. You can take it to a local computer shop and they'll scan it to make sure that it's clean."

The City of Lodi is currently rewriting the code language for all of its servers and added a different kind of security, forwarding its hacker information to law enforcement. The city of Lodi used a third-party server to handle its utilities bill-pay but say customers received a payment extension for bills due last week.