AMSTERDAM: The national tax office in the Netherlands said its website briefly went offline on Monday due to a DDoS cyber attack, after the country's largest banks were targeted.

ABN Amro and ING said they were both targeted by hackers, temporarily disrupting online and mobile banking services over the weekend.

The tax office said its website went down for 5-10 minutes after a DDos attack.

Rabobank also fell victim to an attack on Monday.

In Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), attackers use computer networks they control to send such a large number of requests for information from websites that servers that host them can no longer handle the traffic and the sites become unreachable.