A cyber attack was leveled at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Sunday amid that department’s continued vital role in the coronavirus mitigation. The attack didn’t have any dire effects like a data breach, officials said, and HHS networks were functioning like normal by Monday. Officials were investigating the matter on Monday as well. Not many details were given on what happened exactly, but the attack was noticed because of a “significant increase” in activity on the server, according to spokeswoman Caitlin Oakley. Oakley also confirmed that the database was working fine. Bloomberg News, citing unnamed sources, claimed that there were numerous incidents of hacking, with the apparent intention of slowing things down. One reporter on Twitter said that the hacking constituted an overloading of the server with millions of hits, which could mean a denial-of-service where a deluge of fake traffic is heaped upon a site with the aim at knocking it offline. Those kinds of incidents don’t usually have the intended effect on government sites.
