Computer systems of Minneapolis, Minnesota and other states temporarily brought down by cyberattack

guest · May 29, 2020

Minneapolis city systems temporarily brought down by cyberattack
May 28, 2020
https://thehill.com/policy/cybersec...stems-temporarily-brought-down-by-cyberattack

City government systems in Minneapolis were temporarily brought down by a cyberattack early Thursday at the same time the city was grappling with raging protests over the police killing of George Floyd.
A spokesperson for the city told The Hill that some of the city’s public websites and systems were temporarily shut down by a denial of service (DoS) attack, which involves malicious hackers flooding a server with traffic until it crashes.

City officials were able to bring back 95 percent of affected websites and systems within hours of the attack, with the spokesperson noting that the city expected 100 percent of systems to be back online by the end of the day.

“Although these types of attacks are not completely unavoidable, they are fairly common, and the City of Minneapolis has proactive measures in place to respond to and mitigate disruptions when they do occur,” the spokesperson said.
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guest · May 31, 2020

Did Hacktivist Group Anonymous Take Down Minneapolis PD Website?
May 31, 2020
https://variety.com/2020/digital/ne...e-department-website-george-floyd-1234621332/

The internet was abuzz late Saturday night with speculation that Anonymous — the decentralized hacker collective — had successfully disabled the Minneapolis Police Department website, in retaliation for the murder of George Floyd.
The Minneapolis PD site, as well as the City of Minneapolis’ site, became inaccessible late Saturday, according to multiple user reports.

By early Sunday, the sites were still experiencing access problems, sporadically requiring visitors to enter “captchas” verifying they weren’t bots in a front-end hosted by internet security firm Cloudflare — [...]
The @LatestAnonNews Twitter account, which claims to be run by “multiple Anons,” did not explicitly take credit for the outages of the Minneapolis Police Department and city government websites, but it retweeted others who suggested those were the result of an attack carried out by the group.
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guest · Jun 2, 2020

Minneapolis Police Department Hack Likely Fake, Says Researcher
June 1, 2020
https://threatpost.com/anonymous-hack-minneapolis-police-department-fake/156171/

According to Troy Hunt at Have I Been Pwned (HIBP), the group of allegedly ill-gotten email addresses and passwords has been circulating in multiple forums, with most of them attributing the credential leak to Anonymous, which is a loose affiliation of individuals that carry out hacking to send political messages.
However, Hunt’s review of the situation comes to a different conclusion.

“Don’t spread disinformation and right now, all signs point to just that – the alleged Minneapolis Police Department ‘breach’ is fake,” he wrote, in an analysis posted on Monday, adding that the data is likely not from the MPD at all, but rather a collection of widely available credentials from earlier breaches, and possibly some made-up combinations, that have been assembled into a new database for the purpose of perpetrating this hoax.
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He said that looking into the data set, there are 689 unique email addresses that are included; and as a warning flag, some of them are associated with multiple passwords.
Another red flag is the fact that 654 of the addresses can already be found in Have I Been Pwned – meaning that 95 percent of the credentials have already been compromised.

Bottom line: While many are outraged at the police in Minneapolis and this story feeds a retribution narrative, “the data has almost certainly been pulled out of existing data breaches in an attempt to falsely fabricate a new one,” Hunt concluded.
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Analysing the (Alleged) Minneapolis Police Department "Hack"

These may well be legitimate MPD email addresses and the passwords may well have been used along with those email addresses on other systems, but they almost certainly didn't come from an MPD system and aren't the result of the police department being "hacked".
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guest · Jun 3, 2020

Hackers force Minnesota Senate website offline
June 2, 2020
https://www.startribune.com/hackers-force-minnesota-senate-website-offline/570969032/

Hackers forced the Minnesota Senate website offline Tuesday, the latest in a series of cyberattacks targeting state and local computer systems.

Secretary of the Senate Cal Ludeman wrote in an e-mail to staff that the Senate’s server was “hacked and accessed for several minutes” starting at 4:24 a.m. Tuesday. Senate information technology employees “brought down the server as a precaution” as they worked with Minnesota IT Services and the FBI to trace what was accessed, his e-mail said.
Ludeman said the security breach came from the same hacker group that targeted 10 state agencies, including the governor’s office, in recent days.

It’s unknown whether the attacks are related to demonstrations and unrest sparked by the death of George Floyd. But Gov. Tim Walz said at a weekend news conference that “a very sophisticated denial-of-service attack on all state computers was executed” as the state readied its response to riots on Saturday.
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“That’s not somebody sitting in their basement,” Walz said at the time.
City of Minneapolis websites also experienced outages due to a cyberattack early Thursday morning. A city spokeswoman said there was no evidence of a data breach and that most of the sites were back online by 9 a.m. that day.
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Minnesota IT officials respond to weekend DDoS attacks against state systems

Minnesota technology officials said Sunday that the state’s networks were inundated over the weekend by malicious attempts to knock government agencies offline, though those efforts were successfully repelled.
In a statement Sunday, Tarek Tomes, Minnesota’s chief information officer and the head of Minnesota IT Services, said the attempted DDoS attacks had not disrupted government operations.
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Initially, Gov. Tim Walz said Sunday of the DDoS attempts against state systems that “a very sophisticated denial of service attack on all state computers was executed” Saturday night.
The governor’s description, though, may be overblown.
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guest · Jun 4, 2020

Denial of service attacks against advocacy groups skyrocket
June 3, 2020
https://www.cyberscoop.com/ddos-advocacy-groups-skyrocket-cloudflare/

In figures published Tuesday, the internet security firm Cloudflare said it blocked more than 135 billion malicious web requests against advocacy sites, compared to less than 30 million blocked requests against U.S. government websites, such as police and military organizations. The company did not disclose which websites were affected, specifically.

“As we’ve often seen in the past, real world protest and violence is usually accompanied by attacks on the internet. This past week has been no exception,” Cloudflare chief executive Matthew Prince and chief technology officer John Graham-Cumming said in a blog post
DDoS attacks occur when anonymous web users flood a site with fabricate traffic in an attempt to knock it offline, thus silencing its web presence until the site recovers.

Minnesota state officials said on May 31 that some government agencies had been temporarily knocked offline as a result of DDoS attacks. Those attacks were repelled within hours, officials said, and failed to disrupt government operations.
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guest · Jun 6, 2020

City of Austin websites go down, hackers take credit in protest
June 4, 2020
https://www.kxan.com/news/local/austin/city-of-austin-websites-down-hackers-anonymous-taking-credit/

The City of Austin’s websites went offline early Thursday morning, and a group of hackers took credit, claiming it was a protest against the Austin Police Department.

The hackers known as Anonymous said they were the ones who took the city’s website, austintexas.gov, offline. This morning it appeared to just impact the user-facing web pages. The outages were intermittent throughout the morning, specifically for austintexas.gov.

“We’re seeing a high volume of web traffic and the IT folks are working on it,” Green said. “It’s too early to tell an actual cause at this point.”
The group of hackers tweeted at 4:46 a.m. taking credit for it, then again at 5:45 a.m. saying “@Austin_Police you should have expected us!” and included hashtags regarding the murder of George Floyd.

The 5:45 a.m. tweet also said “more targets are coming.”
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