Mar 15, 2022: Israel says its official websites have been the target of cyber attacks, but services have since been restored.

Websites of the Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Defense and others were affected on Monday.

Israel’s National Cyber Directorate said on Twitter, “In the last few hours, a denial of service [DDoS] attack has been identified on a communications provider which, as a result, has for a short time prevented access to a number of sites, including government sites,”

“As of this hour all the sites are back for activity,” it added.

In this type of attack, attackers overwhelm their victims’ servers with a flood of data requests to paralyse them.

Israel’s ministry of communications said it conducted an “assessment of the situation with the emergency services … following a widespread cyberattack on government websites”.

The directorare overseeing cyber defense said in a report published last year that it had seen a “dramatic increase” in the scale and quality of cyber-attacks around the world and in Israel.

The Israeli daily Haaretz said that a source in the country’s defense establishment believed that this was the biggest cyber attack against the country so far.