Court says cyberattacks struck judicial branch website

Court officials say cyberattacks are why the Minnesota Judicial Branch website was unavailable to the public for 10 days late last month.

A statement Friday from State Court Administrator Jeff Shorba says the website was the target of "distributed denial-of-service" attacks on Dec. 8 and 21. Such attacks overwhelm a website with so much traffic that it becomes inaccessible to legitimate users.

Shorba says the attacks appear to have originated from Asia and Canada.

After the Dec. 21 attack, the administrator decided to limit outside access to the court website until additional safeguards could be installed for the website, which is used by thousands of people daily.

Shorba says the judicial branch did not experience any kind of data breach, and that courts continued operating normally during the disruption.

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