The South African Revenue Service (Sars) and the State IT Agency (Sita) have both moved to shoot down claims circulating on social media that their systems have been hacked, with each insisting there is no evidence of any cyberattack against government digital infrastructure.

“We can confirm that our ICT infrastructure remains fully intact and has not been compromised. There is no evidence of any unauthorised access to government data or systems, nor has any breach of security occurred through unlawful methods,” Sita head of corporate affairs Tlali Tlali said in a statement on Sunday.

Sita said the claims had circulated on various platforms over the preceding 48 hours, alleging a cyberattack against the agency and government ICT infrastructure. TechCentral was able to find posts by various individuals on X, as well as by Nigerian publication TechnoMag on Facebook, alleging the breach.

Sars, in a separate statement on Monday, said it was aware of social media posts and online reports claiming that its systems had been breached, but that these were “false and unsubstantiated”.

“At this stage, there is no evidence that Sars’s systems have been compromised. Sars wishes to reassure the public regarding the integrity of its systems,” the revenue service said, adding that it treats the protection of taxpayer information and the security of its digital platforms as “sacrosanct”. Sars urged members of the public to verify information before sharing it and not to rely on unofficial sources.

Official channels

Sita, for its part, said its threat intelligence team had run what it described as a “multi-tiered scan” of its environment and had found no anomalies indicative of a cyberattack. Its security operations centre, it added, runs on a 24/7 basis.

The agency conceded that one government department’s website was down at the time of the statement but said this was unrelated to any security incident.

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Tlali said the outage was the result of a “scheduled and planned maintenance window”, including upgrades intended to improve the performance, resilience and security of the department’s online presence. The department, which Sita declined to name, had consented to the work, he said.