According to a Wednesday disclosure by leading commercial banks in the Czech Republic, including the Czech central bank, online banking services in the country were hit after the hackers targeted the banks' websites.

Revealing that the websites of the central bank CNB and the Prague's Stock Exchange remained inaccessible on Wednesday morning, the banks said that their servers had been blocked by hackers with massive number of requests.

However, the banks also asserted alongside the disclosure that though the so-called distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks - which underscore a hacking mechanism whereby a website is overloaded with online traffic - launched by the hackers caused network overloads, they neither threatened client accounts nor data.

Meanwhile, about the hacking attack, the CNB said on its Facebook page that the hackers had apparently targeted an external web server which hosted the www. cnb. cz website.

The major commercial banks which were targeted by the hackers included Ceska sporitelna owned by Austria's Erste Bank; Komercni banka owned by France's Societe Generale; CSOB, which is controlled by Belgium's KBC, and the local branch of Austria's Raiffeisenbank.