For those of you who are using Qustodio parental control software, you will appear to be a bot and will be denied access unless you set your whitelist for both Cloudflare.com and RonPaulCurriculum.com to “Ignore.” This will stop your software from scanning these two sites (making you look like a bot).

This has been confirmed that it works by one of our members.

If you are using parental control software or antivirus software that does scans like this, please look for settings that will stop the scans.

There was an issue on one of the security items that has now been relaxed. This should take care of the issue with people not being able to log in once getting to the site.

If you are still having issues, be sure to check the listed items. If everything is set up correctly, and you use parental control software, please check to see if it works if you turn off the parental control software. If it does, then you may need to check your settings for our site. Some parental control software scans the site. This will block you as you appear to be a bot.

We are once again experiencing a DDoS attack today and the volume of the access requests being set to our website is the highest concentration we have seen yet. This is causing the server to be overwhelmed and temporarily shut down. The server does come back up on its own after a few minutes and we have not seen an attach that lasts longer than 2 hours yet. We are hearing about (and seeing ourselves) 2 different error messages:

1. HTTP Error 503: The service is unavailable.
   This message means that the RPC server has been overwhelmed by the traffic from the attack and is rebooting. If you receive this error, please know that we are experiencing it as well and the site should work for you again once the server is up again – about 15 minutes, on average.
2. Error message from Cloudflare.
   Due to the severity of the attack at this time we have tightened as many security features as possible and that includes not allowing access when the request comes from a computer that is filtering or checking our site. Some parental control/accountability programs perform this feature to inspect website content and at this time those requests are being seen as a bot attack and denied by Cloudflare. We are unable to relax any security measures at this time. If you are experiencing this type of error we recommend whitelisting the RonPaulCurriculum.com domain in your software settings. If the error persists, please try accessing from a different computer/device that does not have the accountability software.

We will keep you posted on any further updates and are pursuing every recourse to end these attacks on our site and maintain access for you and your students.

It is unfortunate that we have to set security to block attacks on our website, but I guess that’s all part of the time in which we live.

We have relaxed some of our security.

If you continue to have a problem, please feel free to email us at the email address on your receipt. Please include the following:

1. Your IP address. If you don’t know it, you can find it here: https://www.whatismyip.com
2. The browser you are using.
3. The device you are using. This would include if it is a phone, tablet, or computer and the type it is.
4. Any other information you feel may be relevant, which would include if you are using parental control software, and which software.

If you do not include the above, it will delay a response as we will have to ask for that information.

Our site has come under attack again and the “We are under attack” mode had automatically been set again. We continue to monitor. If you have issues connecting, please be sure you have the most up-to-date browser (if you are using Internet Explorer, it will not work). Also be sure to check on your settings (see the previous posts to check).

We have reduced the security on our site from “I’m Under Attack” to “High.” We continue to monitor traffic coming to our site. If you are still having problems getting to our site (a few of you did yesterday), please see the comments from yesterday to see if the suggestions help your situation.

If you have an old browser, be sure to keep it up to date as some security measures are not supported by older browsers.

Some of you may be having an issue with getting to our site. Due to our site having been under attack, we are going through CloudFlare and you are being redirected from there.

If you are using an older browser, these challenges may not be supported by your browser. Please be sure your browser is up to date.

If you have an up-to-date browser, please check the following regarding settings in your browser settings as they may block the redirect: https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/encryption/dns-over-https/encrypted-dns-browsers/

Some antivirus software settings can also block the redirect.

Please check this site for additional updates.

Our site is up and running, however a handful of you are having issues getting to the site.

If you are having an issue, please email us with the browser you are using.

Know that we are looking into this situation. When we have an answer, we will be posting here.

Our site was/is under attach again. We have placed it in “under attack” mode. This will create an extra step in accessing the site right now. We will leave it on for the weekend and monitor the traffic. We apologize for this issue, however, it is out of our control.

We thank you for your patience this week as we were made aware that some users have been unable to access our website. While most of you were able to access the site as usual, many of you were not, and we realize how frustrating that was for you and your students.          

Rest assured that we have been doing everything in our power to bring back the website for all users as soon as possible! However, because our website was not “down,” it has taken a little while to figure out what is going on. We contacted our website support team as well our hosting company, neither of which could identify any direct issues with the site. 

Through some helpful tracing information sent to us by users not able to access the website, we were able to determine that we are experiencing what we believe is a DDoS attack, or a “Distributed Denial of Service Attack.” This attack is a cybercrime in which the attacker floods a server with internet traffic to prevent users from accessing connected online services and sites. This caused our site to be blacklisted by some Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and then unable to be accessed by users. 

We are taking measures to ensure this does not happen again, and we have engaged the services of a company to fix the issue at hand and provide additional security to prevent things like this from happening in the future.

Again, we thank you for your patience and apologize for the inconvenience as we are working through this!

Jo Dee Soles
Ron Paul Curriculum