Cyberattack takes down Colorado’s main website

Colorado state government’s homepage, Colorado.gov, was taken down Wednesday due to a cyberattack by an anonymous agent, according to news release.

A temporary landing page, with links to unaffected government services, was put in its place. Officials had no estimate on when the main page will be available again.

The cyberattack was claimed by an anonymous group that targeted state government services and websites across the country, according to Brandi Simmons, a spokesperson for the Governor’s Office of Information Technology. She did not respond immediately when asked if there were any ransom demands or what other governments might have been affected.

The outage does not appear to be affecting all Colorado state government. The Department of Revenue’s website, secretary of state’s website and the state Legislature’s website, for example, did not appear affected as of about 2:30 p.m. Mountain time Tuesday.

The governor’s office did not have an immediate comment on the outage.

The Governor’s Office of Information Technology and State Emergency Operations Center are working with other state and federal agencies to restore access to the homepage, according to the release. It is also taking additional security measures to ensure other websites and serves are not affected.

A cyberattack on the government isn’t a unique phenomenon in Colorado. Wheat Ridge’s city government faced a ransomware attack in late August, with hackers demanding $5 million in a hard-to-trace cryptocurrency to put things right. Those city leaders opted to keep their money and rebuild its databases and computer systems itself with existing backups.

And last October, hackers accessed the personal information of more than 30,000 current and former students and employees at the University of Colorado, Boulder. University officials said then that the accessed database included names, student ID numbers, addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers and genders, but not financial information or Social Security numbers.

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