ARRL hack – when will LoTW be back?
The US amateur radio society, the ARRL, suffered a major hack in mid-May, coinciding with the Dayton Hamvention. The hack took out their headquarters IT systems including Logbook of The World, the ARRL Learning Centre, their shop and even their phones.
The ARRL have been slowly getting services up and running but still no sign of LoTW. Their phone system wasn’t restored until the end of May so you can imagine how distruptive this has been for the ARRL.
The good news is that the ARRL say the LoTW database is ‘secure’. It isn’t clear whether this means no data was stolen or whether it means the database is intact. Hopefully the latter as it could be impossible to fully rebuild the database if users had to re-upload their logs as old data could well be missing from users who have changed calls/lost logs/gone SK.
As the ARRL appears to have most critical systems back online we can only hope LoTW restoration will only be another week or so away.