Poland says Russian hackers attacked tax website

WARSAW (Reuters) -A Polish government official said on Wednesday that Russia was behind a hacking attack that blocked users’ access to the online tax filing system, amid persistent high tensions between Warsaw and Moscow over the war in Ukraine.

Western officials say the Russian government is a global leader in hacking and uses cyber-espionage against foreign governments. Moscow has consistently denied that it carries out hacking operations.

“Russians are responsible for yesterday’s attack, it must be made clear. We have information that makes it very likely that this was the adversary,” Janusz Cieszynski, an official responsible for digitalisation, told broadcaster Polsat News.

The Russian embassy in Warsaw said in an emailed response reqeuesting comment that it is “already used to the fact that in the West you can now accuse Russia of anything without evidence. This is another such case in the well-known style of saying it is ‘highly likely'”.

Cieszynski said the attack had consisted of distributed denial of service but that there had been no leaking of taxpayers’ data.

“This is an attack that blocks access to the site, but does not block security and put our data at risk,” he said.

(Reporting by Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk; editing by Tomasz Janowski and Gareth Jones)