Host hit in cyber attack rips government inaction

Despite heavy complaints from within the Dutch government about Tuesday's cyber attack which took out several government websites, the managing director of the host hardest hit in the incident blames years of government inaction for the outage. The attack was clearly directed at the government, and any other websites that went down as a result were "collateral damage," said hosting firm Prolocation's managing director Raymond Dijkxhoorn

"The politicians are responsible for the laws," Dijkxhoorn said to AD. "We have repeatedly made declarations [to authorities] after cyber attacks are carried out. We have indicated how the attacks are carried out, we have said, 'you have to go there and talk with these people.' We have given them everything on a silver platter," he said.

"But nobody does anything about it. Not even feedback."

Later, he said it was specifically Rijksoverheid.nl, the government's primary website, that was targeted by the attackers, according to RTL Nieuws. He would not elaborate any further.

Prolocation provides hosting for several government websites among others. Most of Prolocation's hosted websites were unreachable for almost the whole of Tuesday following the attack.

"It was different from a normal attack. Something we had never seen before," says Dijkxhoorn.