Hackers briefly shut down San Jose police department and city websites

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San Jose officials say the city's website -- and police department website -- have been the target of multiple cyber attacks over the past week.

David Vossbrink, a spokesman for the city of San Jose told Mashable that the attacks started last Thursday. It was a distributed denial of service attack, or DDoS, which is designed to deliberately congest a website's traffic and shut it down.

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"We had intermittent interruptions over following several days," Vossbrink says. "Mostly a matter of annoying inconvenience for staff and public users trying to access our websites for information."

All of the city and police department websites were fully restored by Monday evening, and have experienced no problems since.

It remains unclear why the websites were targeted. But Vossbrink said that the hack was more of a nuisance than anything else, as there have been "no reports of any system breaches or data compromises."

No arrests have been made in connection with the incidents, and Vossbrink noted that it difficult to pin down sources of distributed attacks. DDoS attacks are increasing across the board, according to the FBI, affecting companies and government agencies.

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