Congress.gov, Copyright Office Website Among LOC-Hosted Resources Hit by DDOS Attack

Congress.gov, the Copyright Office’s website and other Library of Congress-hosted websites continued to experience intermittent outages at our deadline Tuesday after a distributed denial-of-service attack against LOC’s IT infrastructure. An LOC spokeswoman confirmed Tuesday that the DDOS attack began Sunday morning and is affecting LOC’s websites, online services and employees’ access to email. LOC announced the DDOS attack in a tweet Monday. LOC is “working to maintain access to its online services while ensuring security,” emailed a spokeswoman. GAO and Congress have highlighted deficiencies in the LOC IT program in recent years (see 1503310046 and 1509080058), and new Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden said IT modernization will be one of her top priorities (see 1604200053).