Government websites taken down by cyberattack

A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack began last night, The Journal reports, and continued into the late morning.

No private or Government data was breached during the attack, which only prevents legitimate access to the websites.

DDoS attacks are designed to overwhelm servers by flooding them with page requests, causing them to suffer slowdowns or service outages as they deal with the load.

Access was restored shortly before noon.