Belgian military battles to restore systems after cyber attack

Hackers accessed network through 'most critical vulnerability of last decade'

Belgium’s military did not say who it suspected of carrying out the attack. Reuters

Belgium’s military is struggling to restore parts of its computer network after a cyber attack on Thursday.

Military spokesman Commander Olivier Severin said the incident caused damage to services connected to the internet. Analysis of the attack and restoration of services were continuing.

He told the Belga press agency that “quarantine measures” had been imposed to contain infected elements.

The attack is believed to have exploited a vulnerability in Log4j, a logging library that tracks system processes.

Log4j is a piece of code, and the vulnerability led to widespread concern, but no attacks on other companies or institutions were reported.

The flaw, which was reported this month, was described by US cyber security company Tenable as “the single biggest, most critical vulnerability of the last decade”.

It can allow attackers to take control of a machine, examine the victim’s network and place ransomware and spyware.