Cameroon’s Minister of Finance, Louis-Paul Motaze, has announced that the country’s tax management software suffered a major cyberattack.
According to the minister, the attack set the system in disorder for about ten days. He revealed that the incident occurred on 25 September 2020 and the platform remained out of use until 6 October 2020 when technicians were able completely to fix the problem.
Motaze said, “The Minister of Finance wishes to inform the general public that the MESURE tax management software was the subject of a cyberattack on Friday 25 September 2020. This resulted in the outage of some online services offered to taxpayers such as the Collection Notice (CN) and the Tax Clearance Certificate (TCC).”
In response, technicians of the National Agency for Information and Communication Technologies (ANTIC) – the government agency responsible for monitoring the cybersecurity systems of public institutions – as well as staff of the tax administration were immediately deployed to handle the situation.
The Minister while commenting on the efforts of the technicians and their tax administration allies said, “Their concerted actions resulted in the re-establishment of the MESURE tax management software on Wednesday 30 September.” He added that that the system witnessed total normally only from 6 October when the process for the reconstitution and retrieval of affected files was completed.
The country’s public institutions in recent times have suffered savage cyberattacks. This has prompted the government to front several campaigns on cybersecurity. In July, the country’s anti-graft agency, CONAC, warned against what it said was a rising wave of cybercrimes in the country.
