Belgium Pulls Main Tax Portal Offline After Cyberattack Days Before Filing Deadline

Belgium's Federal Public Service Finance (FPS Finance) has taken MyMinfin, the country's main online platform for managing tax and financial affairs, offline following a cyberattack. The agency said on Wednesday that it was investigating the extent of the incident and had suspended access as a precaution while specialists assessed the impact and worked to secure its systems. Several other government applications remained fully or partially operational.

The timing is awkward, as some taxpayers face an October 31 deadline for reporting certain types of income. The agency said affected taxpayers will get extra time, with a revised deadline to be announced. Authorities have not said who was behind the attack or how the attackers got in. FPS Finance said there is currently no indication that a data breach has occurred or that any data was stolen, though investigators are still examining whether data was exposed.

The incident follows an earlier alert this month, when Belgian authorities temporarily shut down several government websites over concerns about a software vulnerability. That alert coincided with warnings about two critical flaws in PHP, a widely used programming language, that could let attackers run malicious code remotely on vulnerable servers. Belgium's national cybersecurity center said it had received no reports of successful attacks on Belgian websites using those flaws. It remains unclear whether Wednesday's attack is connected, and authorities have not established any link.