Dutch Justice Minister David van Weel on Tuesday said the disruption “could be sabotage.”
“[Sabotage] is one of the things we are now investigating,” he told broadcaster NOS at the Public Forum ahead of the NATO leaders’ meetings. “Then the question is: Who is behind it? It can be an activist group, it can be a country. It can be many things,” he said.
Van Weel served as NATO’s most senior hybrid and cybersecurity official until the middle of last year.
Officials at Dutch railway provider ProRail and public authorities are still investigating the incident.
The train disruptions are the most recent disruption to events in the Netherlands, after Dutch municipalities on Monday already faced a series of low-level cyberattacks.
A wave of distributed denial-of-service attacks hit a dozen Dutch organizations, including several municipalities, the National Cyber Security Centre confirmed. The attacks did not result in data breaches or intrusions, authorities said.
