PETALING JAYA - Cyber attacks raged between Malaysian and Filipino hackers over the weekend, mirroring the ground skirmishes in Sabah on Friday and Saturday.

Hackers claiming to be from Malaysian and Filipino chapters of the hacktivist group Anonymous attacked websites of both countries.

It was believed that the first online attacks were made by Malaysians, hours after a skirmish erupted between police and Sulu gunmen on Friday.

A message written in Tagalog posted on Anonymous Malaysia's Facebook page that day warned Filipinos that they would strike.

Filipino blog Pinoy Tech News first reported that some of their government websites were hit by denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.

Others were defaced.

Filipino hackers then retaliated, attacking and defacing several Malaysian private and Government-owned websites.

Some claimed to have crashed some Government websites, and publicly announced their exploits over Facebook.

They also called for their followers to launch DoS attacks against local sites.