The incident also occurred at a time when China's live-fire drills encircling Taiwan were taking place from Thursday.

A Kaohsiung government website was covered with a China flag picture for over 10 hours from late Friday to Saturday morning, reports Taiwan News.

On Friday morning (Aug 5), it was admitted that the website of Taiwan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs crashed for a few hours on Aug. 2, 4, and 5.

The ministry explained there was a brute force attempt to crash the server, with up to 17 million times per minute access attempts from numerous Chinese and Russian IP addresses, reported the online newspaper.

As a result, central government agencies were told to stay on high alert for malicious internet activities.

People familiar with the matter told Taiwan News that central government agencies have been ordered to keep tabs on websites and report problems up the chain of command to the Cabinet, every hour from Friday to noon on Monday.