ZORA open to everyone again

In recent months, ZORA has experienced repeated outages due to very high volumes of automated traffic (e.g. bots, crawlers and DDoS attacks). This development affects not only ZORA, but numerous repositories worldwide, and is increasingly posing challenges for the operators of scientific infrastructure.

To keep ZORA stable and openly accessible in the long term, we have implemented various technical measures over the past few weeks. ZORA has recently been protected by the web application firewall Anubis. The security policies applied have been continuously refined and have proven effective in production.

Thanks to these measures, ZORA is once again reliably accessible. We have fully restored access across both server locations in our data centers, for both UZH operations and external users worldwide.

With Anubis, we are relying on a solution that is now also used by numerous other universities and repositories. Our special thanks go to our colleagues at University of Bern and Universitat Pompeu Fabra Barcelona, who provided active support during the implementation and configuration.

We will continue to monitor the situation closely and are continuously developing our protective measures further to ensure the long-term availability and openness of ZORA.

Thank you very much for your understanding and patience!

Explore ZORA now at www.zora.uzh.ch.

Image credits: created with ChatGPT