The Untold Story of a Massive Hack at HHS in Covid’s Early Days

On March 15, 2020, just days after the US declared a national emergency because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the computer network for the US Department of Health and Human Services briefly vanished from the internet. In public remarks the following day, HHS Secretary Alex Azar attributed the 10-minute outage to a cyberattack but downplayed its severity, telling reporters that “there was no data breach or no degradation in terms of our ability to function and serve our important mission here.”

With an historic crisis sweeping the country, the episode seemed unremarkable and immediately receded from public view. But the department ...