Several government websites in Saudi Arabia were sabotaged in a series of heavy cyber attacks from abroad in recent days, disabling them briefly until the attacks were repelled, the government said. An investigation traced the "co-ordinated and simultaneous attacks" to hundreds of Internet protocol addresses in a number of countries, an unnamed source at the Saudi Interior Ministry told state news agency SPA.
The interior ministry website crashed on Wednesday after it received a "huge amount" of service requests, but was back online less than two hours later after the "necessary technical drills" were performed to counter the attack, the source said. The report made no mention of a possible motive Businesses, government agencies and critical infrastructure operators face unprecedented challenges from increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks launched by criminals, hacker activists and foreign governments.