“The U.S. Health and Human Services Department suffered a cyber-attack on its computer system, part of what people familiar with the incident called a campaign of disruption and disinformation that was aimed at undermining the response to the coronavirus pandemic and may have been the work of a foreign actor…”
“We had no penetration into our networks, we had no degradation of the functioning of our networks,” Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said at a White House briefing on the coronavirus on Monday afternoon.”
“The attack, which involved overloading the HHS servers with millions of hits over several hours, didn’t succeed in slowing the agency’s systems significantly, as was apparently intended, according to one of the people familiar with the matter. They requested anonymity to discuss details of the sensitive incident.”
“An HHS spokeswoman said in a statement that the agency had “put extra protections in place” as it prepared to respond to the coronavirus outbreak…” Read the full article here.
Source: Cyber-Attack Hits U.S. Health Agency Amid Covid-19 Outbreak – By Shira Stein and Jennifer Jacobs, March 16, 2020. Bloomberg.
