During the night of April 18-19, the Pro-Life Action League website was hit with a cyber attack. The “denial of service” (DoS) attack began shortly after business hours April 18 and continued through the night. The site was down for about 16 hours.
A DoS attack involves bombarding a website server with bogus traffic in order to shut it down, preventing access by legitimate users. Multiple computers were involved in the attack on the League site.
League Site Shut Down for 16 Hours
I received an alert from the company that hosts the League site at 5:36 p.m. that an attack had been launched and overloaded the servers. The site had to be “firewalled” (removed from web access) until after the attack.
When I found the site still down in the morning, I came into the office early to see what I could do. I called our hosting company and determined that the attack was over, allowing the site to be unlocked.
Initially, however, the site was displaying erratically—sometimes looking so bad that it was unusable. It took me about an hour of exploring the code to diagnose the problem: the servers were still refusing access to some key files. After another call to the hosting company, the site was fully restored.
Radicals Had Threatened More Vandalism to Come
The cyber attack comes on the heels of the slashing of the tires of at least four attendees of the April 2 tribute for my father, Joe Scheidler, held in downtown Chicago. Several pro-abortion groups protested the tribute, including masked militants associated with violence and vandalism against the League in the past.
The night of the tribute, an anonymous abortion advocate posted a note on a radical website boasting of the tire slashing and promising more acts of vandalism.
As of this writing, the identity of the tire-slashers and cyber attackers is unknown.
The cyber attack on the League website is clearly the latest failed attempt by militant, lawless abortion proponents to thwart the life-saving mission of the Pro-Life Action League.
