Federal government target of cyberattack

The Belgian federal government was the target of a cyberattack on Monday night and Tuesday morning, the prime minister's Chancellery confirmed on Tuesday.

The government was hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, in which hackers try to bring down servers by overloading them with internet traffic. The attack began at around 16.00 on Monday and ended at about 11.00 on Tuesday.

As a result of the attack, websites ending in belgie.be, belgique.be, belgien.be and fgov.be were at times difficult to access. The FPS Finance reported "disruptions" to its online services on Tuesday via Twitter.

It remains unclear who was behind the attack. The Chancellery said the requests to overload the servers came from all over the world.

The FPS Chancellery, Belnet, which provides internet to government departments, research centres, universities and colleges, and other relevant service providers have taken additional measures to deal with attacks faster in future, the Chancellery said.

^{© AFP PHOTO / THOMAS SAMSON}