Dutch Government websites suffered a major cyber attack

The Netherlands’ ANP news agency revealed that the outage of Dutch Government websites, lasted for most of Tuesday, was caused by a major cyber attack.

According to the Netherlands’ ANP news agency, the outage that brought down several Dutch Government websites for most of Tuesday was caused by a major cyber attack. The outage began at 0900 GMT on Tuesday and lasted for more than seven hours. The news agency confirmed that despite the Dutch Government websites were not reachable for the entire day, phone lines and emergency communication channels were not impacted by the attack.

“The outage that downed Dutch government websites for most of Tuesday was caused by a cyber attack, the Netherlands’ ANP news agency reported on Wednesday.” reported the Reuters in a blog post.

The ANP news Agency did not provide the source of its information and no member of the Dutch government has officially commented the news reported by the Agency. On Tuesday, spokesmen of the Dutch  Government explained that the outage was a consequence of a damage of a fiber optic cable.

Other websites were targeted by a “distributed denial of service” attack,  including the GeenStijl.nl web portal.

The hackers targeted those websites which mock politicians and religions as confirmed by Rimbert Kloosterman, official at the Government Information Service.

“Our people are investigating the attack together with the people from the National Centre for Cyber Security,” said Kloosterman.

According to the experts, the attack affected the network of hosting provider Prolocation, which hasn’t commented the incident.

(Security Affairs –  Dutch Government, cyber attack)