By Abdul Wajid Khan ISLAMABAD, Feb. 11 (INP-WealthPK): According to the Ministry of Finance, a comprehensive plan has been made for upgrading  IT (information technology) infrastructure and improving the system security to protect the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) from cyber-attacks and avoid any economic loss. The ministry said in a written reply recently submitted to the National Assembly that like all other systems exposed to the public, the FBR’s systems are also subject to cyber-attacks on a regular basis — on average, approximately 71,000 times a month — but almost all of these are stopped by the security measures in place. However, as the tools available to hackers become more sophisticated, the risk of a successful intrusion also increases. Therefore, there is a need to regularly upgrade the security systems. But the increased frequency and severity of cyberattacks does not result from obsolete or outdated infrastructure. The statement added that as regards cyber-attacks, there has been a worldwide increase of such incidents, and even the best technology firms are not immune. For example, it mentioned that there were significant cyberattacks on Alibaba (November 2019), LinkedIn (June 2021), Sina Weibo (one of the largest Chinese social media platforms) (March 2020), and Facebook (April 2021 and again in October 2021). “It is not a fact that the FBR failed to upgrade its IT equipment and related software in last three years despite millions of dollars in loans and other grants,” the statement clarified. It further added that an upgrade to FBR’s IT infrastructure has been delayed due to the lengthy and complex procurement processes prescribed by the World Bank, the highly technical nature of the equipment to be procured, and the Covid-19 situation last year. However, no misuse of these funds has occurred. The earlier major funding to upgrade and improve FBR’s information technology infrastructure was under the World Bank’s Tax Administration Reform Project (TARP) in 2010. Subsequently, in 2018, when the critical equipment was approaching end of life (EOL) and end of service (EOS), the FBR got an opportunity under the Tax Accelerating Growth and Reform (TAGR) project to procure large-scale data centre equipment, it added. The Finance Ministry further said that the procurement was carried out in two phases, which completed in 2019 and the equipment was deployed at the data centres. The new servers, network and storage devices provided an effective virtualised environment for hardware resources deployed at FBR’s data centres, basic backup and disaster recovery, management of heterogeneous resource pools, lightweight operation, cloud services, infrastructure visualisation, performance management, and other capabilities. Improving hardware utilisation rate from 5-15 percent to 60-80 percent or even higher enhanced functions, operations and management (O&M) efficiency, without any adverse impact on the existing service performance. The World Bank’s Pakistan Raises Revenue (PRR) programme was approved in 2019, wherein $80 million was allocated for improvement of FBR’s IT infrastructure. The procurement process is well underway. However, some extra time has been consumed due to the complexities in the World Bank’s procedural requirements. The government entered into a financial agreement of $400 with World Bank for the PRR program. The project consists of two components. Under the component-1, $320 million was allocated for Disbursement Linked Indicators (DLIs) financing, while under component-2, $80 million was allocated for traditional Investment Project Financing (IPF). The implementation period is five years from 01-07-2019 to 30-06-2024. So far, under this program, the World Bank has disbursed $151.078 million to the government, while the Finance Division has disbursed Rs6.6 billion to the FBR. Under component-II of the PRR program, funds amounting to $34 million have been allocated for replacement of end-of-life hardware, active-active private cloud, licencing and legacy branded software update, data warehouse, business intelligence (BI) tools with other software solutions and full connectivity for FBR territorial formations. Thus, only $34 million has been allocated for improvement of the FBR’s IT infrastructure. The procurement process is underway, but so far, no amount has been spent from this component. The Finance Ministry further stated that even the best technology companies in the world have suffered serious cyber-attacks, involving service disruption and loss of data. In the case of FBR, although the August 14 cyber-attack did cause a disruption lasting for a few days, no data loss occurred due to the security measures already in place. Thus, it cannot be considered as a failure or incompetence on part of the government.