Belgium's tax agency knocked offline by cyberattack

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Belgium's finance and tax agency hit by cyberattack, filing deadlines euronews.com

Belgium's Federal Public Service Finance — the agency that collects the country's taxes — has taken its online tax portal MyMinfin offline along with several other digital services after reporting a cyberattack on Wednesday. Officials say the precautionary shutdown will allow investigation and securing of the systems while they determine what happened, and that upcoming tax filing deadlines affected by the disruption will be extended, though no new dates have been announced. The agency says there are so far no indications that anyone's personal data has been breached.

The target is a pointed one. A finance ministry holds precisely the records a state uses to know everything about its citizens: incomes, assets, filings, identities. The Belgian statement offers no attribution and no technical detail — the pattern is the familiar one of an agency discovering the perimeter after something has already crossed it.

The timing invites comparison with this week's disclosure across the Channel, where the UK's police and fire services were shown to be running unpatched systems and backups that do not work. Neither report described a hostile foreign power or a sophisticated adversary; both described public institutions whose security posture lagged well behind what any mid-sized private company would tolerate — largely because a company that loses customer data pays for it, while a ministry that loses citizen data budgets for it.

Belgian taxpayers will now wait for new deadlines from the same organisation that was supposed to have kept their data safe. The ministry has not said when MyMinfin will return.