On Tuesday, 16 April, cyberattack forced Belgian Foreign Ministry to turn off its electronic services, including passports’ issue and documents legalization.
Diplobel network that connects Ministry with embassies and consultants around the word that completely switched off. Restoration of its work will take about 72 hours.“We noticed an attempt to penetrate the Foreign Affairs network and decided, as a precaution, to isolate the network and proceeded to restart the system.”, — Belgian media quotes Foreign Ministry spokesperson Karl Lagatie.
It is not reported if this attack was an attempt to intrude in Foreign Ministry network. In Ministry argue that leak of information was prevented. What purpose pursued cybercriminals and if government of other state ordered this attack, is unclear.
The Foreign Ministry’s website only cited “urgent technical reasons” for the outage.
Source: www.rtl.be
