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Technical problems took down government website Rijksoverheid.nl, amongst other high profile sites, Feb. 10, 2015. (Photo: Zack Newmark / NL Times)
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Technical problems took down government website Rijksoverheid.nl, amongst other high profile sites, Feb. 10, 2015. (Photo: Zack Newmark / NL Times)
Wednesday, 11 February 2015 - 11:10
DDoS Attack brought down government websites
The network outage that took down Rijksoverheid.nl and many other government and private websites on Tuesday was caused by a Direct Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, the government revealed on Wednesday. As the takedown was happening on Tuesday, a representative of the National Cyber Security Center told the Telegraf that they had no evidence of a cyber attack.
The outage lasted from 10 a.m. into the evening, and affected hosting provider Prolocation and their clients, including the government sites, broadcaster PowNed, GeenStijl and political party GroenLinks.
"The Public and Communications office, part of the Ministry of General Affairs, in conjunction with Centric/Prolocation and the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) are evaluating the attack," the government said in a statement.
In a DDoS attack, a website is bombarded with excessive traffic so that the security of the site is so busy stopping unwanted traffic that regular users can not get through.
