City officials confirmed the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which makes services unavailable to intended users through a flood of access attempts from many IP addresses, saying they began to see issues the afternoon of Thursday, Nov. 5.
Despite the attack, which disrupted access to a host of online city resources, the five-day incident was resolved Monday afternoon with no apparent loss of city data, according to officials.
Fortunately, no systems appear to have been breached nor data lost, but the interruptions do create inconvenience to the public and staff when service is intermittently available,” according to San Jose Information Technology Department (ITD) personnel. “ITD continues to work with our vendors to address this matter and develop methods to mitigate potential DDOS issues in the future.”
Albert Morales, spokesperson for the San Jose Police Department, told Government Technology that the attack is part of a growing trend of cyber-based attacks that continue to increase.
“In general, companies and government agencies at all levels across the country have been seeing this sort of thing more often in recent years,” Morales said.
According to David Vossbrink, communications director for the city of San Jose, all of the city’s systems have resumed normal operations and are available to the public. He called the cyberattack “mostly a matter of inconvenience to users.”