Canada Revenue Agency shut down public access to its website in order to secure protection against the Heartbleed bug on Tuesday.
The suspension of services has come at a crucial time since the deadline for filing personal income tax is only three weeks away on April 30th.
Revenue Minister Kerry-Lynne Findlay while speaking to the media said that officials were working over night to deal with the problem as fast as possible. “We deal with very sensitive and personal taxpayer information on a daily basis and so we want, as a precautionary measure, to make sure that our systems are functioning and back up as soon as possible. We know it’s a difficult time being tax filing season for Canadians, we are on top of this,” he said.
The Heartbleed Bug can allow hackers to gain access to huge amounts of private data including credit card numbers, passwords and emails. It affects a cryptographic program called OpenSSL which is used to run a common hosting software called Apache used at the CRA. Technology Analyst Carmy Levi while speaking to media sources describing the bug said that it is similar to someone having a second key to your house, so they could walk in whenever they wanted.
Online services that have been affected include EFILE, NETFILE and My Account which are used by taxpayers to access their account. However the CRA has told media sources that they will give consideration to taxpayers who are not being able to file taxes due to this hindrance.
