Officials haven’t explicitly said that the attacks are connected to attempts to foment civil unrest as law enforcement and the National Guard mount an unprecedented mobilization to tamp down unprecedented violence over the past several days following the death of George Floyd, a black man who died Monday after a white police officer knelt on his neck. But the inference is there to be made.
Here’s a statement from Tarek Tomes, the state’s chief information officer and commissioner of MNIT, the state’s information technology agency:
“MNIT’s Security Operations Center is defending against distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) cyber-attacks aimed at overloading state information systems and networks to tip them offline. Keeping our communications systems secure during times of crisis is critical to protecting the Minnesotans that we serve, and we work to meet the challenging and evolving threat to those systems every day. At this time, these attacks have not successfully disrupted the state services that Minnesotans depend upon, and MNIT is working in close coordination with partners at the Department of Public Safety and with the federal government to share intelligence and stay proactive on cyber threats.”
The situation was first mentioned publicly by Gov. Tim Walz at a Sunday morning briefing.
Further details weren’t immediately available.
©2020 the Pioneer Press (St. Paul, Minn.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
