Early in the morning on Thursday 10/15/2026, our website, ShorewoodCitizenAdvocates.com, was the victim of a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS). A DDoS attack is a malicious cyber threat that floods a targeted server, website, or network with a massive wave of internet traffic to knock it offline or make it completely slow and unusable. Think of a store that normally serves 30 customers suddenly having 500 show up at one time and blocking the entrance so no one can get in. That’s what happened to SCA starting on Thursday morning and continues today.
The good news is that once we identified the issue affecting our website, we were able to take steps to counteract the attack.
The less than good news is that to thwart the attacker, SCA needed to put a “speedbump” ahead of entry to our website. It’s not an ideal experience for you, our readers, and we ask for your understanding.
DDoS attacks can be driven by very different motives, from entertainment and revenge to political activism, unfair competition, and financial extortion. As our readers know, besides general interest articles, SCA also provides news, policy analysis and critiques of various actions and decisions made by the Shorewood City Council. Based on feedback we have received, individuals sometimes disagree with these observations and opinions. That’s to be expected. We welcome other viewpoints and opinions and are always ready to publish them on our site.
While we are likely to never know the motivations of the coward who is attacking us, it obviously is an attempt to silence us. If this vandal is using a DDoS attack to silence us, it is not only un-American, it is also a crime. In the U.S., this crime is Governed by the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) (18 U.S.C. § 1030), which prohibits knowingly causing damage, impairing data availability, or disrupting network integrity on unauthorized systems. These types of attacks are notoriously hard to track back to the perpetrator, but with increasing AI capabilities, who knows? Stay tuned!
