Lahore, 15th August: Hackers attacked Pakistan’s largest data center run by the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) bringing down all websites since 2 am Saturday.
According to details, hackers attacked Pakistan’s tax center FBR late on Saturday night bringing down all the official websites, hence, managed to break the hyper-V software by Microsoft.
A senior official disclose the news to Express Tribune on condition of anonymity and said, “There has been a national crisis-like situation since 2.00 am Saturday morning and we may not be out of the woods by Sunday evening.”
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However, the official website of the FBR reported otherwise and said, “The FBR’s website is temporarily down for scheduled maintenance.”
The Revenue issued a general press release and reported in-progress service optimization activities at the FBR House Data Center, Islamabad.
FBR regrets and apologizes for any inconvenience this may have caused and appreciates continued cooperation of the stakeholders.6/6
— FBR (@FBRSpokesperson) August 14, 2021
The FBR stated that their technical team is at present migrating services, the completion of which will result in the increased overall productivity of FBR IT operations.
The statement added that this migration is required to facilitate the up-gradation of the system in order to provide the best services to their clients.
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It also said, “The stakeholders, who are being provided services from the data center, are informed that there were unforeseen anomalies during the migration process, which has resulted in the unavailability of services, since early hours of the last night. The FBR team is ensuring the 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.”
FBR further regretted and apologized for the inconvenience it caused to its stakeholders.
Meanwhile, the senior official reported to the news outlet that the cyberattack has affected the virtual environment of the tax machinery. He added that this time the center’s virtual machines were attacked and the hackers managed to exploit the weakest link, which is the hyper-V software by Microsoft Inc.
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The unnamed official also reported that Pakistan has contacted Microsoft that is lending its help to recover it from the hacker’s attack.
Some other sources informed that the hackers were making attempts to break the data tooms for the past few days and there was also a warning issued of a serious cyber-attack to take place. However, FBR ignored the warning and the hackers were finally able to take over some of the data.
An official from the information technology department reported that they are now trying to create a new virtual environment, since the previous one was damaged, and the procedure may take up to two days.
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He added, “We are trying to restore the websites by tomorrow afternoon and the essential data center by tomorrow evening, as we do not want to cause more damage by shifting data in haste.”
It is to be noted that the FBR is the largest database that carries information of transactions of trillions of rupees along with the details of the wealth, income and expenditures of its citizens.
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