An apparent cyberattack downed Maryland’s health department in the US and Covid data. Here’s what we know and don’t know

For much of the pandemic, the health department’s coronavirus dashboard has provided visitors to the website with insight into the virus’ spread through a variety of tallies, metrics and graphs. The service was disrupted for more than two weeks after officials detected the breach Dec 4. — DARWIN LAGANZON/Pixabay

Earlier this month, the Maryland Department of Health fell victim to an apparent cyberattack that prompted the agency to take some of its servers offline. One result was the department couldn’t update most of the metrics on its Covid-19 data dashboard for weeks.

The state has disclosed few details about what it describes as a “network security incident” first detected Dec 4, even after it restored on Monday (Dec 20) some of the coronavirus data reporting earlier this week.