Dutch Tax Authority also hit in DDoS attack

The Dutch Tax Authority was hit by a DDoS attack on Monday, NOS reports. According to the tax service, its site was difficult to reach for a time on Monday morning, but everything should be working again. Three Dutch banks also faced such cyber attacks since Saturday.

Over the weekend ABN Amro was hit by multiple DDoS attacks, leaving its online services unavailable for hours at a time. ING reported such an attack on Sunday, and on Monday morning Rabobank also reported being hit by a DDoS attack. "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, according to NOS.

A spokesperson for Dutch central bank DNB called these attacks exceptional. "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."

In a DDoS attack, a website is bombarded with massive amounts of data. This overloads the site's server, and crashes the site. Such cyber attacks on banks are now the order of the day, Klaas Knot, president of DNB, said on television program Buitenhof on Sunday. According to him, the DNB website faces such an attack about once a second. "That's the reality in 2018", Knot said.