The Dutch Interior Minister Piet Hein Donner has given a press conference in the early hours of Saturday morning to indicate the urgency of the problem.

There is doubt about the reliability of Government sites because the Dutch internet security company DigiNotar appears to have been hacked on July 19, compromising its security guarantees for “a number of domains, including Dutch Government Websites.

DigiNotar is a company that offers security certificates for the “SSL” cryptographic protocol to guarantee that communications between a user’s browser and a website are private.

The Government sites will remain online, otherwise the internet traffic will be too much disturbed. Visitors to the sites will be warned that the sites are not secure.

All Dutch government sites, including DigiD, social benefit agencies and the UWV make use of these certificates. Now the Dutch government has announced measures to hand over control of internet security to a different company, which may take a few days, according to the minister.

The DDoS attack also caused an outage in the Dutch central payment system iDeal. This DoS-’attack’ (Denial of Service) caused the payment system to go partially down.

DDoS attacks involve sending huge quantities of useless information which causes a network to freeze up, making it impossible for clients to log in. “Many of our customers are inconvenienced by this situation. We are working hard to restore the network and will file a report with the police.” The spokesperson was unable to say who was behind the attack.

Last February, a cyber attack on the website of the bank and fires at the head office of Rabobank were claimed by a group called Conspiracy Cells of Fire.

The group mentioned in a statement on website Indymedia activists “the fascists of the Rabobank, ” are financing and investing in the weapon industry and weapon trade in Egypt, Greece, Israel, Libya and Algeria. Conspiracy Cells of Fire count the Rabobank responsible for the dead of thousands of people, including children.

The URL directs the users to Paypal and requests €5 in exchange for instructions that explain how to remove the hack. But how did he get in? By relying on users’ forgetfulness. All iPhones have a default root password. Those who forget to change it are vulnerable to this very kind of attack.

It appears the young hacker has had a change of heart on the money issue, and posted instructions for undoing what he did to several Dutch iPhone users. According to a commenter below, he has also apologized for asking for money and returned whatever ill-gotten gains he received from his stunt. However, that doesn’t mean someone else couldn’t pull the same trick and just not tell you about it. If you jailbreak and do things like leave an SSH daemon running, change the default passwords.

Source: Ars Technica