At Just the Time
This is exactly when you'd expect the Chinese, Russians, and Iranians to hit it for maximum chaos. No surprise there.
In an impeccable instance of horrible timing, the US government's Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) says it fended off a cyberattack by online scumbags. The department told The Reg on Monday it was on the receiving end of what was believed to be a failed distributed denial of service (DDoS) assault the previous day …
Yes, but only if they stood to gain from the chaos. If they wanted to start conflict or disguise another type of attack, a powerful attack on a health system during a health crisis wouldn't hurt. If they wanted to create confusion and terror to affect an election, that might help too. But what do they stand to gain this time? The elections going on now are relatively minor, and some have been postponed. Also, the attack didn't even work. If this was a state actor, they have done nothing useful.
"The attack – presumably not a load of citizens hitting Uncle Sam's web servers looking for information"
I suspect it was normal traffic. It's not like our Sainted .gov has anything resembling clues when it comes to the proper care and feeding of an extremely well used Web site. Every time I attempt to use a Government website, it's nothing but trouble ... almost as if it were designed and built by the lowest bidder, instead of the most competent.
Oh. Wait ...
Looking at the way incompetence is blamed on others and the value of having boogeyman for corralling the sheep, one should always take whatever any government, especially the ones that have lied time and again, with a huge bag of salt.....Blaming others for its own failures is the oldest trick in the bag of all governments...