Several government websites were sabotaged in a series of cyber attacks from abroad in recent days, disabling them briefly until the attacks were repelled, the government, according to reports.

An investigation traced the “coordinated and simultaneous attacks” to hundreds of Internet protocol addresses in a number of countries, an Interior Ministry source told 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.

A source at the National Center for Cyber Security confirmed yesterday that many government websites were attacked simultaneously from foreign Internet protocol addresses.

The source said that the Interior Ministry’s website was attacked at 4:50 p.m. and crashed after receiving too many service requests.

The website was restored at 5:58 p.m. on the same day.

The source said that the authorities have launched an investigation to find and punish the perpetrators.

Businesses, government agencies and critical infrastructure operators face unprecedented challenges from increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks launched by criminals, hackers and foreign governments.

An attack last year on Saudi Aramco damaged some 30,000 computers.