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[Weaver]

I wanted to use the following website https://www.citylit.ac.uk/ and all I get is the mysterious message that you see. It has been like that for four days or so. I’m not sure that this is a reasonable question to ask, but does anyone know what might have happened here?

I appreciate that kitizens reading this may have no possible way of answering my specific question, but I’d be interested in any general tips for researching such problems / outages.

This is the City Literature Institute in Central London, which offers hundreds of evenings classes and is where I have been studying various languages. Twenty seven years ago, I studied Scottish Gaelic at the City Lit for three years and that was what triggered my move from London to Skye in 1998, so I could become a full time student at smo.uhi.ac.uk.

I’m wondering if the City Lit has been hacked or attacked by ransomware or other malware?

I note that the web server “help.citylit.ac.uk” appears normal.

[burakkucat]

I used the "Down for Everyone or Just Me?" site and it confirmed "It's not just you! citylit.ac.uk is down."

The algorithm that site uses is as follows --

How do we check if citylit.ac.uk is down?

1) We check the citylit.ac.uk server to see if it is responding and we do this from a region closest to you. This test we perform simulates what an actual web browser (e.g. Safari, Chrome, Firefox) would do when trying to visit the website.

2) We determine if the citylit.ac.uk server is returning an error message that indicates some sort of problem. These types of errors generally mean that a visitor -- you -- would also have trouble using or visiting the service.

3) We return the results of our test from our servers and let you know if citylit.ac.uk is up or down.

Giving the site a gentle poke, nothing unexpected is seen --

Code: [Select]

[bcat ~]$ host citylit.ac.uk
citylit.ac.uk has address 151.101.65.124
citylit.ac.uk has address 151.101.193.124
citylit.ac.uk has address 151.101.129.124
citylit.ac.uk has address 151.101.1.124
citylit.ac.uk mail is handled by 10 citylit-ac-uk.mail.protection.outlook.com.
[bcat ~]$ ping -c1 citylit.ac.uk
PING citylit.ac.uk (151.101.1.124) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 151.101.1.124: icmp_req=1 ttl=58 time=10.9 ms

--- citylit.ac.uk ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 10.935/10.935/10.935/0.000 ms
[bcat ~]$ ping -c1 151.101.129.124
PING 151.101.129.124 (151.101.129.124) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 151.101.129.124: icmp_req=1 ttl=58 time=10.8 ms

--- 151.101.129.124 ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 10.891/10.891/10.891/0.000 ms
[bcat ~]$ ping -c1 151.101.193.124
PING 151.101.193.124 (151.101.193.124) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 151.101.193.124: icmp_req=1 ttl=58 time=11.2 ms

--- 151.101.193.124 ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 11.218/11.218/11.218/0.000 ms
[bcat ~]$ ping -c1 151.101.65.124
PING 151.101.65.124 (151.101.65.124) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 151.101.65.124: icmp_req=1 ttl=58 time=10.7 ms

--- 151.101.65.124 ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 10.780/10.780/10.780/0.000 ms
[bcat ~]$ nmap 151.101.65.124
Starting Nmap 7.80 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2022-12-06 20:55 GMT
Nmap scan report for 151.101.65.124
Host is up (0.012s latency).
Not shown: 998 filtered ports
PORT    STATE SERVICE
80/tcp  open  http
443/tcp open  https

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 4.64 seconds
[bcat ~]$ nmap 151.101.193.124
Starting Nmap 7.80 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2022-12-06 20:56 GMT
Nmap scan report for 151.101.193.124
Host is up (0.012s latency).
Not shown: 998 filtered ports
PORT    STATE SERVICE
80/tcp  open  http
443/tcp open  https

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 4.57 seconds
[bcat ~]$ nmap 151.101.129.124
Starting Nmap 7.80 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2022-12-06 20:57 GMT
Nmap scan report for 151.101.129.124
Host is up (0.012s latency).
Not shown: 998 filtered ports
PORT    STATE SERVICE
80/tcp  open  http
443/tcp open  https

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 4.11 seconds
[bcat ~]$ nmap 151.101.1.124
Starting Nmap 7.80 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2022-12-06 20:57 GMT
Nmap scan report for 151.101.1.124
Host is up (0.011s latency).
Not shown: 998 filtered ports
PORT    STATE SERVICE
80/tcp  open  http
443/tcp open  https

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 4.55 seconds
[bcat ~]$


[Weaver]

Agreed.

I too used a couple of such useful website tools, one of which said that the site had been ‘down’ (in their chosen sense) for three days, but that was a day or so ago so it’s more now. I wonder if some of these sites use user complaints as the metric, ie it’s ‘down’ when users say that it it, maybe with a bit more sophistication added to the algorithm in order to combat misreporting.


I take it though that something bad has happened for citylit to replace the content of their large functional website with just this one-page warning. Do you concur?

Any speculative thoughts.

[DerisionEQ]

A quick google led to a twitter thread confirming they have "IT problems":

https://twitter.com/citylit/status/1600160076110495745

Could be hardware failure, software failure, ransomware attack, disgruntled employee sabotage ... who knows, although if it has been four days, in which they should have been able to restore a backup or have hardware repaired, it looks odd, unless their IT department is incompetent.

[meritez]

What does City Lit stand for?
In 1918, following the war, the London County Council wanted to strengthen non-vocational education. It approved the opening of five literary institutes: Plumstead and Woolwich, Marylebone, Dalston, Peckham, and City Literary Institute (City Lit).

Is that City Literary Institute Tech, looking at the acronym I understand why they went with City LIT.

[Weaver]

They’re in or near Covent Garden.