The activity happened Sunday night, sources said.
March 16, 2020, 5:53 PM
4 min read
The Department of Health and Human Services experienced suspicious cyberactivity Sunday night related to its coronavirus response, administration sources confirmed to ABC News Monday.
The suspicious activity HHS was not a hack but it may have been a distributed denial of service -- or DDOS -- attack, according to multiple sources.
The distinction is important because there was no apparent breach of the HHS system, which could interfere with critical functions of the lead agency responding to the coronavirus contagion. The DDOS effort apparently had automated users -- called bots -- trying to overwhelm the public-facing HHS system in order to slow it down or even paralyze it.
Officials believe any coordinated effort -- if there were one -- was not particularly successful and are satisfied that the system was not significantly affected.
Nevertheless, the concern is that foreign actors might attempt to exploit the COVID-19 crisis to achieve some of their anti-American goals.
The Department of Health and Human Service in Washington, D.C., Feb. 27, 2020.
The Department of Health and Human Service in Washington, D.C., Feb. 27, 2020.The New York Times via Redux
“As federal state and local governments focus on handling the current public health crisis, national security officials are also tracking other threats -- in particular those posed by terrorist or extremist groups and foreign adversaries who may seek to take advantage of all of the attention being focused on the coronavirus and conduct an attack,” said John Cohen, a former acting Undersecretary of the Department of Homeland Security and contributor to ABC News.
At this point, analysts are trying to determine the origin of the activity targeting HHS. Officials have told Congress that the intelligence community fears that entities connected to Russia would try to use the current situation to sow even more chaos in the American public.
The FBI declined to comment.
“We are aware of a cyber incident related to the Health and Human Services computer networks and the federal government is investigating this incident thoroughly," NSC spokesman John Ullyot said in the statement. "HHS and federal government cybersecurity professionals are continuously monitoring and taking appropriate actions to secure our federal networks. HHS and federal networks are functioning normally at this time."
Intelligence and cyber officials are investigating to see if there is a connection to Sunday's messages saying there would be a national quarantine instituted, but as of now, they have not linked the two.
The attack was first reported by Bloomberg.
