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While Americans battle for flu symptom relief and to find some toilet paper, the government battles off cyber attacks.
Amidst attempts to stop the damage from the coronavirus, the U.S. Health and Human Services Department has been the target of a cyberattack. Three people close to the situation said that Sunday night, while the department was working to address the pandemic, their computer system was the target of a concerted cyberattack effort.
Just before midnight Sunday, the department tweeted,
“Text message rumors of a national #quarantine are FAKE. There is no national lockdown. @CDCgov has and will continue to post the latest guidance on #COVID19.”
This tweet was in response to both the suspected hacking attempt and the sudden spread of misinformation in the age of the pandemic.
Despite the concerted effort to attack the Health and Human Services Department, the attackers failed. The hack aimed to slow the department’s computer systems down, but sources close to the matter have confirmed that the hackers were unable to cause any real damage to the system.
According to sources, both President Trump and Secretary of State Michael Pompeo are abreast of the situation. However, the attack caused no meaningful slowdown. No data was stolen in the hacking attempt, according to sources, though the nature of the attack doesn’t seem to have been data-driven. Instead, this seems the hackers intended to slow the US’s response to the pandemic.
It is unclear who initiated the attack, though the US assumes that it was a hostile foreign power. Iran, China, Russia and North Korea have all attempted, at varying times, to influence the US through use of hacking. However, this attack could have also been by a rogue hacker working alone or with a small group.
The attack was essentially a denial of service, or DOS, attack, where the hackers used a network of bots to hit the department’s servers with millions of requests over a short frame of time.
This type of attack attempts to overload a server by overtaxing its ability to respond to requests. However, the attacker in this case seems to have been rather inept.
Millions of requests flooded the department. However, this caused no slowdown in their critical functionality.
The White House, the NSA and the Department of Health and Human Services have all yet to publicly announce the attack.
