Posted on January 11, 2016 by CELO NET
DDoS Attack on Minnesota Court System Takes Website Offline for Ten Days
[h3]DDoS Attack on Minnesota Court System Takes Website Offline for Ten Days[/h3]
[bold]The Minnesota court system has announced today that its website (mncourts.gov) was down for ten days in December due to a series of severe DDoS attacks launched against its servers.[/bold]
According to a memo sent out to its subscribers, the state’s Judicial Branch says that the first attack was recorded on December 8 and took the site down during that day.
A second attack was recorded on December 21, also took the site down, but this time, the court’s IT staff decided to leave their website offline, while they installed more robust security systems.
The website remained offline until December 31, as the IT staff upgraded their servers.
“It is clear that the decision to temporarily make the site unavailable to the public prevented the Minnesota Judicial Branch from experiencing additional DDoS attacks,” the Judicial Branch’s announcement reads. “During the time that the site was unavailable, Judicial Branch IT staff observed that attackers were regularly monitoring the status of the site, seemingly trying to determine when they would be able to launch another DDoS attack.”
[bold]No data breach occurred during the attacks[/bold]
During the ten-day blackout, the website remained accessible from the Judicial Branch’s internal network. Users trying to access court documents could have found them on Minnesota State Law Library, as Beau Berentson, Director of Communications and Public Affairs at the Minnesota Judicial Branch, was instructing disgruntled users on Twitter.
As soon as the website was brought back online on December 31, the IT staff reported another DDoS attack. Most of the IPs involved in the attacks were traced back to Canada and various Asian countries.
The Judicial Branch reported that no data breach occurred during these attacks. The website is still not accessible from certain parts of the world, probably a measure part of its DDoS mitigation solution.
During the month of December 2015, we saw multiple DDoS attacks launched against various small-time gaming servers, the Play Station Network, Xbox Live, Steam servers, EA servers, Linode, Coinbase, BTTC, BBC, Rutgers University, and many others. December 2015 may have been the busiest month ever when it came to DDoS attacks.