Jordan Robertson and Riley Griffin report:
On March 15, 2020, just days after the US declared a national emergency because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the computer network for the US Department of Health and Human Services briefly vanished from the internet. In public remarks the following day, HHS Secretary Alex Azar attributed the 10-minute outage to a cyberattack but downplayed its severity, telling reporters that “there was no data breach or no degradation in terms of our ability to function and serve our important mission here.”
With an historic crisis sweeping the country, the episode seemed unremarkable and immediately receded from public view. But the department knew at the time that the attack represented a serious and unusual cyberthreat, according to two officials involved in the response: former Chief Information Officer Jose Arrieta and former Chief Information Security Officer Janet Vogel.
Read more at Bloomberg.