The federal government was the target of a cyber attack on Monday evening and Tuesday. According to the Prime Minister’s Office, it was a DDoS attack. It is not yet clear who is behind the attack.

The hackers started their DDoS attack on Monday afternoon, writes the Belga news agency. In a DDoS attack, the criminals send millions of data packets to the server with the aim of taking it offline. In this case, the websites ending in “.belgie.be”, “.belgique.be”, “.belgien.be” and “.fgov.be” were hard to reach for a while. “The collapse was not general, it was waves of attacks that slowed things down at certain times,” Francis Adyns of FPS Finance told Het Nieuwsblad.

Additional measures

It is not yet clear who is behind the DDoS attack. Last week, a similar attack disrupted Outlook and OneDrive. Then the perpetrators could have connections to Russia. This is not surprising since in several previous cases the perpetrators apparently also operated from this region. The Chancellery emphasized that the attacks to overload the servers and take them offline came from all over the world.

Due to the DDoS attack, the servers had a lot of trouble for a few hours. Around 11 a.m. on Tuesday morning, the worst of the suffering was over and the websites continued to be accessible as usual. Such attacks, aimed at preventing access to websites, leave the underlying data untouched. Citizens don’t have to worry about their privacy. The federal government and the Internet provider Belnet, together with other relevant service providers, are taking additional measures to control such attacks more quickly in the future.