State news agency SANA said on Friday it and other government websites in conflict-plagued Syria have come under attack by hackers, complicating access to their sites. It did not specify the origin of the attacks.

Syrian authorities have protested in the past of similar attacks which it says "form part of the aggression against Syria," the scene of a brutal civil war since March 2011.

A self-styled Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), which supports the regime, has in past months hacked the websites of leading Western news outlets, including the Washington Post and Associated Press's Twitter account.  The SEA on its own website says it is defending the Syrian people from Arab and Western media campaigns against Damascus.