LoTW – It has Been 30 days (and the Data is Still Said Safe)

LoTW remains down as the ARRL addresses the damages done to them by a cyber attack.

Interestingly some hams a literally making up tales of “LoTW doom & gloom.”

Must be boredom, as by definition by their being hams they come from a smarter cut of cloth than the average joe.

https://groups.arrl.org/g/ARRL-LoTW/topic/lotw_will_be_back/106612676

Jon Bloom, ex-KE3Z writes:

Despite ARRL’s statements that LoTW and DXCC data are safe, it seems that some users are concerned that this may not be the case due to the time that it is taking to restore service.

Perhaps it will ease some minds if I tell you that I know for certain that these data are safe. I know this because I personally assisted ARRL staff to get these data backed up to locations and systems that are in no way connected to ARRL’s HQ or cloud systems. The LoTW data, for example, exists in multiple physical locations and cloud backup services. Such is also the case for the LoTW source code. In addition, I imported the LoTW data backup into a separate, new test database system to verify it. This took several days since the database is about 3 terabytes in size. (It’s a LOT of data!)

Getting the systems themselves back on-line is another matter, and I have no information to share about that as I’m not involved in the ongoing process of restoring them. ARRL has apparently made the decision, wisely in my view, not to bring any affected systems back into service until all parts of them can be vetted and secured. But the data itself is safe, and LoTW will definitely be back at some point.

— Jon

Again I am not finding the outage affecting my operations in any real way, other than a transitory delay in posting QSOs made.

So what, those uploads to LoTW can wait.

73

Steve
K9ZW