ISLAMABAD: People at the helm of the country’s tax collecting body are clarifying that there is a slight glitch in Active Taxpayer List (ATL) module, saying Custom operations remained fully operational; however, hackers have been reported to launch cyberattack on the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) website making it non-operational.
Issuing a clarification on Sunday regarding disturbance in Customs Operations, the FBR stated that Customs operations have remained fully operational throughout this week. It added that Goods Declaration (GD) filing in Weboc for export has remained fully operational saying, “However due to slight glitch in Active Taxpayer List (ATL) module, import GDs filing was temporarily affected where ATL data was required as input in the Weboc system, which was restored on priority”.
The FBR further said, “GD for imports has been filed smoothly since yesterday (Saturday) afternoon. Daily GD filing (import as well as export) for the last three years on 14th August are 310 in the year 2019, in 2020, it was 1148 and last day on 14th August, it was 1901. Moreover, import GD filings for the last two days are 198 on 14th August and 86 today till noon”.
On the other hand, it has been reported that hackers have attacked Pakistan’s largest data centre run by the FBR and managed to break the hyper-V software by Microsoft, bringing down all the official websites operated by the tax machinery.
Currently, the FBR website is down practically as there is a message when it is opened: “This site can’t be reached”.
It is pertinent to mention that on August 14, the FBR has issued a press release regarding in-progress service optimisation activities at the FBR House Data Center, Islamabad saying a technical team is currently migrating services. It claimed the completion of this migration shall result in the increased overall productivity of FBR IT Operations. It further stated, “FBR regrets and apologises for any inconvenience this may have caused and appreciates continued cooperation of the stakeholders.”
It has been reported that the cyberattack has affected the virtual environment of the data centre whereas this time the data centre’s virtual machines were attacked as the attackers managed to exploit the weakest link, which is the hyper-V software by Microsoft Inc. Sources have been cited saying Pakistan has contacted Microsoft to recover the data from the attack whereas cybercriminals have not yet been identified.
Sources claimed that after knowing about the attack, the FBR issued an internal warning: it “experienced a severe cyberattack on our data centers. All applications have been shut down and need support from all teams”. Currently consignments are stuck up at border stations which are of fresh vegetables and courier consignments apart from other goods. People are unable to get the benefit of Active Taxpayers List due to disconnection from the data source.
