Website and online services of the Federal Board of Revenue have become inaccessible after hackers attacked the FBR’s network.
On Saturday, the nation was celebrating Independence Day while unknown hackers attacked the FBR website, data, and disrupted the online tax-related services, causing setback to tax record and creating alarms in the government and corporate circles about safety of essential tax data.
The hackers have attacked the FBR’s largest data centre, damaged the hyper-V software of Microsoft, collapsing all the official websites and online facilities being managed by the FBR.
The FBR has issued a general press release regarding in-progress service optimisation activities at the FBR House Data Center, Islamabad.
The FBR explained that the technical team is currently migrating services. The completion of this migration shall result in the increased overall productivity of FBR IT Operations. This migration is necessary to facilitate the up gradation of the system in order to enhance the best services to our clients, the statement added.
“The stakeholders, who are being provided services from the data centre, are informed that there were unforeseen anomalies during the migration process which resulted in the unavailability of services. The FBR team is ensuring restoration of services as soon as possible to keep the downtime to a minimum. This activity is expected to be completed in the next 48 hours.
Quoting official sources, daily Express Tribune said the cyber-attack has affected the virtual environment of the data centre. This time the data centre’s virtual machines were attacked and the attackers managed to exploit the weakest link, which is the hyper-V software by Microsoft Inc, official said, adding Pakistan has contacted Microsoft that is helping to recover it from the attack.
On Monday (Aug 16), FBR completely restored its website along with all the online features/services like before.
