Dutch Tax Auth. again targeted in cyber attack

The websites of the Dutch Tax Authority and DigiD were hit by DDoS attacks on Wednesday afternoon. As a result no tax declarations could be filed for hours, and people had trouble logging in to various government websites, NU.nl reports.

The attack on the Tax Authority started around 3:00 p.m., and DigiD was hit around 3:25 p.m. Both sites were fully accessible again by 8:00 p.m.

The attack did not affect the security of taxpayer's data, not even if people were filing declarations when the DDoS attack started, a spokesperson for the Tax Authority said to the newspaper.

On Tuesday the Tax Authority also faced a disruption that turned out to be DDoS related. Late in January the Tax Authority and various banks were hit in multiple such attacks. The suspected perpetrator was arrested in February. He said he did it "as a joke".

In a DDoS attack, a website is bombarded with massive amounts of data. This overloads the site's server, and crashes the site.