Why are most cyber attacks reported as taking a website down?

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As we see more and more cyber attacks making headlines they all seem mention “the ministry of X website was taken down” or “ Department of X’s website was unavailable”. It seems to me that taking down a website is a pretty small move, if that’s it. I don’t need to access the Dept. Of Energy website to make my life work. Is the website being down just a public facing indication of more bigger things going on behind the scenes, like files being inaccessible for internal users?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Accessibility of the site to other people usually isn’t the point of an attack. If they can get into the system, they are often able to gain information not accessible with normal usage. For a bank, that could be account numbers of the customers. For the department of Energy, it could be schematics for power stations or lines. Like you suggested, they could also lock out other peoples access so they can’t update things that may need constant adjustment

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