Hackers on Saturday attacked Pakistan’s largest data centre run by the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) and managed to break the hyper-V software by Microsoft, bringing down all the official websites operated by the tax machinery.
“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,” a senior official said while explaining the gravity of the situation to The Express Tribune on condition of anonymity.
“The FBR’s website is temporarily down for scheduled maintenance,” read the website when it was opened.
However, the authority issued a general press release regarding in-progress service optimisation activities at the FBR House Data Center, Islamabad.
“The stakeholders, who are being provided services from the data centre, 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 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.”
It further stated, “FBR regrets and apologises for any inconvenience this may have caused and appreciates continued cooperation of the stakeholders.”
The official said the cyberattack 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,” he added.
He said Pakistan has contacted Microsoft that is helping to recover it from the attack.
“It is cyber terrorism on our Independence Day,” said the official, adding that the attackers have not yet been identified.
“Since the virtual environment has been damaged, we are trying to create a new virtual environment that may take up to two days,” said another official from the information technology department.
“We are trying to restore the websites by tomorrow afternoon and the essential data centre by tomorrow evening, as we do not want to cause more damage by shifting data in haste.”
The report quoted officials saying that there has been a national crisis-like situation since 2 am Saturday and the country’s shipments have also started getting affected due to the shutdown of all FBR websites and data centres.
