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. A DDOS effort enlists automated users — called bots — to overwhelm a public-facing system in order to slow it down or even paralyze it.
