The national tax office in the Netherlands and several of the country’s largest banks were hit by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on Monday.
The tax office said that its website had gone down for 5-10 minutes after the attack.
ABM Amro, ING, and Rabobank are some of the major banks affected by the DDoS attack which disrupted online and mobile banking services over the weekend.
The attacks led to banks’ services being down for hours at a time.
"We are now working on an alternative access route to the site, it is not yet possible to say how long this will take," Rabobank said.
"Since the big DDoS attack on ING in 2013, everything seemed to be in order. There is now clearly something we need to respond to, and we are discussing this with the banks," a spokesperson from the Dutch central bank, DNB, had to say.
Spokesperson for the Tax Authority, André Karels said that no data had been leaked and that the attack is under investigation by the National Cybersecurity Services.
DDoS attacks work to bring down websites by sending a lot of traffic to one server at the same time. While such attacks itself cannot cause a breach in networks or data to be leaked, they are often used as distractions by hackers trying to penetrate a network.
The tax office said that its website had gone down for 5-10 minutes after the attack.
ABM Amro, ING, and Rabobank are some of the major banks affected by the DDoS attack which disrupted online and mobile banking services over the weekend.
The attacks led to banks’ services being down for hours at a time.
"We are now working on an alternative access route to the site, it is not yet possible to say how long this will take," Rabobank said.
"Since the big DDoS attack on ING in 2013, everything seemed to be in order. There is now clearly something we need to respond to, and we are discussing this with the banks," a spokesperson from the Dutch central bank, DNB, had to say.
Spokesperson for the Tax Authority, André Karels said that no data had been leaked and that the attack is under investigation by the National Cybersecurity Services.
DDoS attacks work to bring down websites by sending a lot of traffic to one server at the same time. While such attacks itself cannot cause a breach in networks or data to be leaked, they are often used as distractions by hackers trying to penetrate a network.