The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration restored its servers yesterday, 10 days after an attack knocked the agency’s website offline.
The government agency confirmed last Tuesday that 10 of its servers had been hacked in early August after it received an alert from the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT).
An emailed statement from US-CERT confirmed that a “cybersecurity incident” knocked the servers offline but insisted the attack was “limited in scope” and “involved systems which host publicly available information,” adding that no personal or confidential business information was leaked.
Documents on the servers that were hacked are regularly made available to the public. NHTSA usually makes information like vehicle recalls and data surrounding automobile investigations free to peruse via one of their sites, safercar.gov.
Those servers were disconnected from the Internet following the attack as the agency took “countermeasures to return all equipment to normal operation” but are back online now, as are the documents hosted on the servers.
The NHTSA, part of the Department of Transportation, is tasked with writing and enforcing fuel economy regulations, motor vehicle standards and is generally a go-to for those in the traffic safety industry.
