Hackers on Sunday managed to hack Pakistan’s largest data center run by the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) after breaking the hyper-V software by Microsoft. Through this attack the hackers brought down all the official websites operated by FBR.
While quoting unnamed sources, Express Tribune reported that the hackers were trying to break the data rooms for the past few days. A warning was also issued that a serious cyber-attack might take place in the coming days, the publication reported.
The reports also revealed that Pakistan contacted Microsoft that was helping to recover it from the attack.
During the attack, the virtual environment of the data center got affected, after the attackers managed to exploit the weakest ink, the hyper-V software by Microsoft Inc to hack FBR’s website.
“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 center by tomorrow evening, as we do not want to cause more damage by shifting data in haste.”
Meanwhile, FBR also issued a statement of their own, in which it shared details about the in-progress service optimization activities at the FBR House Data Center, Islamabad. The watchdog said that a 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 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 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 regrets and apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused and appreciates continued cooperation of the stakeholders”, the regulatory authority said.
The database of FBR is the largest data center carrying information of trillions of rupees transactions, along with the details of the wealth, income and expenditures of citizens of the country.
The data center also contains details about various personal and business transactions due to various types of withholding taxes that are being deducted on them.
