Boston internet service disrupted briefly by DDoS attack

Internet service in Boston was disrupted on Tuesday in what is being called a “minor act of cybervandalism,” according to the Boston Herald.

The outage, affecting city agencies and the police and fire departments, was “short, but widespread,” said Mayor Martin J. Walsh.

A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that caused computers worldwide to redirect network traffic to City Hall computers is cited as the method by which web connections were shuttered.

While Jascha Franklin-Hodge, the city's CIO, dismissed the attack as "a minor act of cybervandalism,” the incident is another example of an attack method becoming increasingly common and illustrates the vulnerabilities enterprises face on a daily basis.

Experts explained that as the attack harvests no data, it might have been retribution or an attacker's attempt to gain notoriety.

Franklin-Hodge said his team was able to restore service within 20 minutes.