Over the past week, we have experienced performance issues and downtime of our Aspen catalogs:
- All catalogs and the app, accessed from anywhere, were extremely slow or down from 11/13 through 11/14
- A small handful of libraries have reported they cannot access the catalog or app within their library networks
If your library is unable to access the catalog from your library network, please contact SWAN support.
We have now learned from ByWater Solutions, our support and hosting provider for Aspen, that we are experiencing a denial of service (DoS) attack. This attack is ongoing, and ByWater has implemented some temporary measures to block traffic from bots and crawlers as they explore long term solutions. Patron data is not affected.
SWAN provided a known list of library IP addresses to ByWater to be sure legitimate library traffic was not blocked. Unfortunately, some libraries were still blocked from accessing the catalog within their library networks due to bots spoofing the libraries' network.
We know this is frustrating for library staff and patrons. Our priority is to take every immediate measure to restore access for those libraries that cannot access the catalog within the library, then work with ByWater to put measures in place to prevent future DoS attacks.
We will keep you informed as this situation develops.
