ISLAMABAD – The official website of the Federal Board of Revenue (FBE) hasbeen hacked by unknown hackers.
“The FBR’s website is temporarily down for scheduled maintenance,” read thewebsite when it was opened.
An FBR official said, “It is cyber terrorism on our Independence Day,adding that the attackers have not yet been identified. The cyberattack hasaffected the virtual environment of the data centre.
The hackers were making attempts to break the data rooms for the last fewdays and there was also a warning issued that a serious cyber-attack mighttake place soon, he added. He said Pakistan contacted Microsoft that washelping to recover it from the attack.
“Since the virtual environment has been damaged, we are trying to create anew virtual environment that may take up to two days,” said anotherofficial from the information technology department.
“We are trying to restore the websites by tomorrow afternoon and theessential data centre by tomorrow evening, as we do not want to cause moredamage by shifting data in haste.”
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However, the revenue collecting authority released a press releaseregarding in-progress service optimisation activities at the FBR House DataCenter, Islamabad.
The release read, “A technical team is currently migrating services. Thecompletion of this migration shall result in the increased overallproductivity of FBR IT Operations. This migration is necessary tofacilitate the up gradation of the system in order to enhance the bestservices 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 migrationprocess, which has resulted in the unavailability of services, since earlyhours of the last night. The FBR team is ensuring restoration of servicesas soon as possible to keep the downtime to a minimum. This activity isexpected to be completed in the next 48 hours.
“FBR regrets and apologises for any inconvenience this may have caused andappreciates continued cooperation of the stakeholders.”
