The government website in Maine was knocked out by a cyber attack yesterday. It was confirmed as a ‘denial of service’ attack where a site is bombarded with data requests and overwhelms the host server. A spokesman for the state’s Department of Administrative and Financial Services said that no data was breached and they had no reason to believe any personal information was compromised. Network experts Cisco warn in a
whitepaper that these attacks are of increasing risk to businesses, referring to them as ‘weapons of mass disruption’. It says that an online-based business could lose thousands of dollars within hours of being offline and urges defenses that include identification of good web traffic from bad with the intention of keeping business continuity.
