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To tell whether a government website is down during a cyberattack, monitor it from several external locations and compare those results with internal network, server, storage, application, and log data. Check upstream provider and ISP status, too. A failed check or slow page is an availability warning—not proof of an attack—so responders should establish the scope and cause before declaring an incident.
Build monitoring that shows both reachability and service health
External checks answer whether people in different places can reach the public site. Internal telemetry helps explain what is failing behind the network edge. Neither view is complete on its own: a site may appear healthy from one probe while users elsewhere cannot reach it, or an external check may fail because of a resolver, provider, or route problem rather than the website itself.
Check from multiple locations
Use independent probes in geographically diverse locations, including places relevant to the people the agency serves. The UK National Cyber Security Centre recommends visibility into website availability from diverse locations and monitoring that can help detect and analyze an attack while it is underway. Its guidance was published on 20 January 2019 and reviewed on 25 March 2024: NCSC denial-of-service testing and monitoring guidance.
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Decide what each check must verify. A useful progression is DNS resolution, connection establishment, TLS negotiation, an HTTP response, and—where appropriate—a meaningful page or safe read-only transaction. A server returning any response is not necessarily evidence that the site is usable. Choose a check interval and alert delay that suit the service’s criticality, and name the people or team expected to receive and act on alerts.
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Monitor internal resources and applications
Track the network, compute, and storage resources that support the service, along with application responsiveness. Watch for sustained or unusual changes in bandwidth, CPU, memory, request volume, and application behavior. If a request flood consumes network capacity or overwhelms application resources, these signals can help responders locate the pressure point.
Include upstream signals and logs
Where available, arrange monitoring feeds or alerts from upstream network and DDoS-protection providers. Some traffic may be filtered before it reaches the agency’s own network, so local telemetry alone may not show the full picture. Enable and centralize relevant server, firewall, endpoint, and cloud-service logs so responders can compare activity across systems. CISA’s guidance discusses logging and regular monitoring for high-risk events: CISA: Use Logging on Business Systems.
Investigate indicators without assuming the cause
CISA, the FBI, and the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center describe several possible DDoS indicators: a service becoming unavailable or slow, network congestion, unusual traffic patterns, application or server crashes, high resource use, difficulty accessing DNS or firewall services, unusual user behavior, and alerts from a DDoS protection service. These signs can also result from non-malicious faults or upstream outages. Read the joint DDoS attack guidance as a set of investigative clues, not a diagnosis from any single metric.
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Correlate the evidence
- Establish scope: Compare failed or slow checks across probe locations and review user reports. Determine whether the issue affects everyone, one region, one route, or a particular page or function.
- Compare timestamps: Align external probe results with DNS and network status, application and infrastructure metrics, relevant logs, provider dashboards, and incident reports. Preserve relevant records for response and later analysis.
- Check upstream: Contact the ISP and relevant service providers. Ask whether their networks have an outage, are under attack, or are filtering or mitigating traffic that affects the agency.
- Escalate through the incident plan: Treat the event as suspected malicious activity when indicators warrant it, but do not label it a DDoS attack solely because one probe failed.
This correlation process is an operational way to use the signals recommended in official guidance; no individual probe or metric establishes the cause by itself. CISA, the FBI, and MS-ISAC also recommend provider coordination during response: joint DDoS response guidance.
Prepare continuity and response before an outage
Monitoring is useful only if the organization knows who will receive alerts, make decisions, communicate, and coordinate mitigation. CISA’s DDoS guidance recommends a continuity plan for critical applications and communications, designated decision channels, consideration of how an attack could affect access to network hardware, exercises with internal and external stakeholders, and an after-action review to improve the plan.
- Document agency incident contacts and current escalation routes for the ISP, hosting or cloud provider, DNS provider, and DDoS-protection service.
- Identify continuity alternatives for critical public services and communications, and define how staff will publish updates if the primary website is unavailable.
- Exercise the response with internal teams and external providers, including how alerts are verified and how decisions are made if normal network access is disrupted.
- After an event or exercise, review timelines, logs, alert routing, handoffs, and continuity measures; update the plan based on what did and did not work.
The NCSC also recommends testing defenses against both network-layer and application-layer attacks with legitimate testing providers. Testing should be planned and authorized; monitoring should support detection and analysis during an event.
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Choose monitoring and protection services against agency needs
Official guidance supports multi-location monitoring and coordination with providers, but does not rank commercial vendors or prescribe one procurement specification. Compare offerings against the agency’s architecture, jurisdiction, service criticality, procurement rules, and existing upstream protection.
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- Coverage: Which probe locations are available, and do they reflect constituent access locations?
- Verification: Can checks validate a meaningful page or function rather than only a responding host?
- Alerting: How quickly are alerts delivered, how are they routed and escalated, and is there an out-of-band path if email or the primary network is affected?
- Visibility: Can the agency access request logs, traffic summaries, and upstream provider feeds needed for investigation?
- Protection: What network-layer and application-layer protections are offered, and how has capacity been tested?
- Governance and operations: Review data retention, access controls, privacy, accessibility, support, procurement terms, and integration with the incident plan.
CISA’s election cybersecurity resources name DDoS protection, Cloudflare Web Analytics and logs, and Google Project Shield as examples relevant to election security. Project Shield is described there as a free DDoS defense service for news, human-rights, and election-monitoring sites; these examples are not endorsements or universal government procurement recommendations. See CISA election cybersecurity toolkit and resources.
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CISA Cyber Hygiene Services are described as free for eligible U.S.-based federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial governments and qualifying critical-infrastructure organizations. The offering includes vulnerability scanning for public static IPv4 assets, weekly findings and urgent alerts, and web application scanning with monthly and on-demand reports. Eligibility and enrollment details can change, so confirm them on the CISA Cyber Hygiene Services page. These services identify exposure and vulnerabilities; they are not live uptime monitoring or DDoS mitigation.
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For a screenshot of what a page looks like during an incident, a URL-based capture can help document the visible result. It complements availability checks and logs; a screenshot alone does not establish whether users in other locations can reach the site or explain the failure.
ScreenshotNeo is a website screenshot API and MCP server for developers. Its request can return an image or PDF, and it can remove cookie/consent banners, newsletter popups, and chat widgets before capture. Bot checks, blank pages, timeouts, failed loads, and cache hits are not billed, with the outcome indicated in response headers. An MCP server provides screenshot tools for AI agents. See ScreenshotNeo and its API documentation.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Can a screenshot prove that a government website was available to the public?
No. It records a captured page, but does not show whether visitors in other locations could reach the site or establish why an outage occurred.
Does CISA Cyber Hygiene Services provide live uptime checks?
No. The described services focus on vulnerability and web application scanning, not live availability monitoring or DDoS mitigation.
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