By Robert Salonga, San Jose Mercury News
The city's public-facing websites were rolling back into function Monday after an apparent cyberattack caused intermittent disruptions, including a lengthy outage for the San Jose Police Department's home page.
Officials said city-operated websites had experienced periodic disruptions and outages since Thursday, when it was identified as something more severe than an internal IT problem, city spokesman David Vossbrink said.
San Jose police sent out a bulletin Friday alerting the public to its outage.
Monday, Vossbrink said IT specialists appeared to have repaired the effects of what is known as a denial-of-service attack, most commonly where a Web server or servers are bombarded with so many access requests that they overwhelm and disable the host.
Vossbrink added that whoever initiated the attack is not known.
"It was mostly annoying," Vossbrink said of the intermittent disruptions. "Some people were twitchy about it, and you don't really see how much you depend on it until it's not there."
Last December, the city of Oakland's websites were targeted by the hacker collective Anonymous, in apparent response to what it called heavy-handed tactics authorities used during protests against police brutality.
©2015 the San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
