The shutdown Monday of three Alaska military websites was caused by a hardware problem at Fort Wainwright, not cyber terrorism, according to Army officials.
The sites, www.wainwright.army.mil, www.greely.army.mil, and www.usarak.army.mil, went dark early Sept. 9, as technicians began replacing parts of a web server at the Army post near Fairbanks.
"No Army or military functions were compromised as a result of the website shutdowns," said John Pennell, an Alaska Army spokesperson.
Pennell said the JBER site – which serves the combined Anchorage base serving the Army and Air Force – was not affected because it is hosted on a different server.
During the outage, all Alaska military personnel had email and web access. Only the host pages for Fort Wainwright, Fort Greely and the U.S. Army Alaska were affected, according to Pennell.
Before the Army explanation, the web was humming with rumors of a cyber attack on the Alaska Army websites early Monday. The U.S. Marine Corps website was hijacked by the Syrian Electronic Army on Sept. 2, but has since been reclaimed by military IT technicians.
Pennell said the three websites affected by the Alaska outage should be back online Tuesday.
Contact Sean Doogan at sean@alaskadispatch.com