Several KSA government websites have faced ‘coordinated and simultaneous’ cyber attacks, from the overseas in recent days.
In the midst of the attacks, Saudi Arabia’s interior ministry website was brought down for an hour after being targeted in a denial of service attack from several IP addresses in different countries.
Saudi’s information security centre has started an inquiry into how to counter such attacks and lessen their impact on online services, reports reveal.
In August 2012, the kingdom’s national oil firm, Saudi Aramco, was hit with a malicious virus that infected about 30,000 of its workstations, which are now cleaned and restored to service.
The attack, claimed to be one of the most destructive cyber strikes against a single business, used a computer virus known as Shamoon.
In May 2102, security researchers exposed a massive cyber attack aimed at stealing data from Middle Eastern countries that had been operating undetected for up to two years.
The malware, nicknamed Flame, had been unleashed against countries across the Middle East and Africa, including Iran, Israel, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
