A government minister in Azerbaijan announced on Saturday that twenty five government and public Internet resource websites were attacked recently but were up and running again in about two hours.

The Minister of Communications and Information Technologies in Azerbaijan, Ali Abbasov, told reporters that 24 of the attacks were carried out using IP addresses in Iran while one was from the Netherlands.

Abbasov said that a letter had been sent to the Iranian side giving them information about the IP addresses used during the attack. He said that Iran was probably being used as a transit country while the real attcker was based elsewhere. It was not thought that any state agencies were involved.

Abbasov added that more cooperation was needed with neighboring countries, under the framework of the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, to prevent more attacks in the future.