Belgium started “Hack the Government 2025” to engage ethical hackers to find gaps in the government’s online systems. The Belgian Federal Public Service for Digitalization is trying to add more government cybersecurity protections to help defend important systems from breaches and attacks from cybercriminals. This is the first of its kind in Belgium and shows a clear and positive trend in Europe, advocating for systems and platforms to expand and embrace ethical hacking practices.
Shift in collaborated defenses
Belgium is changing the face of cyber attack defense in the country to expand protections in systems before a cybercriminal attacks government systems.
Campaigns cover government cyber platforms and activities, social security, and taxes. The goal of the government is to add protections that most of the internal audits will never pick up. France and the UK have tied fraud and cyber defense partnerships first, and Belgium is changing that.
Ethical and malicious hackers alike from Belgium and other nations have flocked to the initiative, first launched this year, and the government reports it received an unprecedented range of submissions for vulnerabilities, all the way from old and easily cracked encryption to weak or missing firewalls, to updated software, to unprotected software. The government has rapidly deployed patch updates for secured and operational services.
The government pays for every confirmed vulnerability submission
High-risk and dangerous, unnoticed weaknesses that could allow personal data to be taken from the target would be a high risk to be submitted for high pay. This type of incentive system encourages submission of confirmed vulnerabilities, which strengthens the government’s incentive to pay for the confirmed vulnerabilities to be high.
Importance of the initiative
Around the world, public institutions started “Hack the Government 2025” to engage ethical hackers to find gaps in the government’s online systems.
Shift in collaborated defenses
This is the first of its kind in Belgium and shows a clear and positive trend in Europe, advocating for systems and platforms to expand and embrace ethical hacking practices.
Participation and Findings
Ethical and malicious hackers alike from Belgium and other nations have flocked to the initiative, first launched this year, and the government reports it received an unprecedented range of submissions for vulnerabilities, all the way from old and easily cracked encryption to weak or missing firewalls, to updated software, to unprotected software.
Comments from the Initiative
Delivery Digital Services Belgium Minister Mathieu Michel commented on the initiative’s success during its initial stages as follows:
“What this initiative has shown is that collaboration is the name of the game when it comes to cybersecurity.”
From the ethical hackers’ perspective, this sentiment is also shared.
“It is great when governments appreciate the sentiments of the hacker community. Trust, transparency, and safety of a system can be achieved with hack community engagement in such programs.”
As for 2026, the government intends to enhance the initiative
More complex challenges, as well as the use of artificial intelligence for the automation of system Vulnerability detection, is on the way. The government is also thinking of collaboration with educational institutions for the training of cybersecurity scientists to provide adequate manpower for the upcoming programs and to sustain such collaboration in the future.
With cyber threats constantly changing, Belgium sends the message that digital security is a shared effort, and the role of an ethical hacker is fundamental to digital crime.
Institutions have faced a large number of cyber attacks involving ransomware and data breaches, risking the loss of public trust and national security. Belgium introduced “Hack the Government 2025” to alleviate and shift the perspective from high cyber threats. Especially after major health system and municipality cyber attacks across Europe. Belgium anticipates and strives to alleviate major disruptions across Europe, not only to protect the digital ecosystem but also the entire country.
