US Health Agency is hit by a DDOS attack leveraging the COVID-19 pandemic

Cyber criminals are always waiting to exploit people’s anxiety to deploy their attacks. On March 16, The US Health and Human Service (HHS) Department website was hit by a DDOS attack, affecting the website latency for hours. Albeit, COVID-19 is causing tremors across the globe it is completely surprising to see attackers taking down the healthcare during this crisis. Paradoxically, this is what the criminals are looking forward to, website with high traffic and serves key purpose. 

HHS was a crucial site to them and CDC to share updates on COVID-19, the measures that is being carried out by the department and how things were kept under control. Along with DDOS attacks, it is also believed that the attackers have sent some rumours about a national lock down via SMS, e-mail and social media. On March 16th, Alex Azar, Secretary of HSS said “We had no penetration into our networks, we had no degradation of the functioning of our networks”, at the White House. 

Furthermore, according to the reports from Bloomberg, the attackers didn’t enjoy the complete benefits of the DDOS attack, as the website wasn’t totally affected and was able to withstand the overloading decently. An HHS spokeswoman also confirmed that they are increasing their security measures to keep thing intact and investigating this cyber incident further to obtain the complete details of the act. As such, HHS has mentioned that this act was enacted by a foreign state and further information are sensitive to be disclosed now.

How to protect your network against DDOS attacks?

DDOS attacks can be deadly if left undetected, the case of GitHub is one historic example of the attack and how they combated it. Building effective firewalls, monitoring network traffic and using DDOS scrubbing centres for protection and mitigation. Watch the below video, to understand the DDOS attack from scratch and how can enterprises fortify their defenses against this traffic overloading attack.

In last one month, there have been numerous cyberattacks that are leveraging upon the COVID-19 trend. Watch out for phishing emails, sudden traffic overloads in the IT infrastructure, and do not download coronavirus ransomware apps from unknown sources.

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