Communications in Belgium are extensive and advanced. Belgium possesses the infrastructure for both mobile and land-based telecom, as well as having significant television, radio and internet infrastructure. The country code for Belgium is BE.
In computing, a denial-of-service attack is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to a network. Denial of service can be accomplished in a variety of ways, including programming or logical vulnerabilities, improper handling of resources, or by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled. The range of attacks varies widely, spanning from inundating a server with millions of requests to slow its performance, overwhelming a server with a substantial amount of invalid data, to submitting requests with an illegitimate IP address.
Neustar, Inc. is an American technology company that provides real-time information and analytics for risk, digital performance, defense, telecommunications, entertainment, and marketing industries, and also provides clearinghouse and directory services to the global communications and Internet industries. Neustar was the domain name registry for a number of top-level domains, including .biz, .us, .co, .nyc, and .in until the sale of the division to GoDaddy in 2020.
The Vrije Universiteit Brussel is a Dutch and English-speaking research university located in Brussels, Belgium. It has four campuses: Brussels Humanities, Science and Engineering Campus, Brussels Health Campus, Brussels Technology Campus and Brussels Photonics Campus.
Telenet Group N.V. is the largest provider of cable broadband services in Belgium. Its business comprises the provision of analog and digital cable television, fixed and mobile telephone services, primarily to residential customers in Flanders and Brussels. In addition, Telenet offers services to business customers all across Belgium and in Luxembourg under its brand Telenet Solutions.
The University Computing Centre in Zagreb has a long tradition in the area of information and communication technologies. It was founded in 1971 within the University of Zagreb, the only Croatian university at the time, with the purpose to enhance the implementation of information technologies in the academic community as well as in Croatia in general.
Internet in Belgium has a high level of adoption and engagement, with a 93% uptake rate among individuals as of 2022, which is higher than the EU average of 89%. The country is on par with the EU average regarding digital skills, with 54% of its population having at least basic digital competencies. Belgium's commitment to digital inclusiveness is illustrated through initiatives like the BeCentral digital campus, which has trained over 425,000 students since 2017 to narrow the digital skills gap.
The Federal Public Planning Service Science Policy or Belgian Science Policy Office, Federal Science Policy, known by the acronym BELSPO, is the federal government body responsible for research policy in Belgium. It designs and implements research programmes and networks and manages the participation of Belgium in European and international organisations. BELSPO supervises Belgian federal scientific organisations.
Science and technology in Belgium is well developed with the presence of several universities and research institutes. As Belgium is a federal state, science is organized at several levels. At the national level, there is the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office (BELSPO) and each of the three regions, Brussels-Capital Region, Flanders and Wallonia have their own regional science and technology development:
The deployment of IPv6, the latest version of the Internet Protocol (IP), has been in progress since the mid-2000s. IPv6 was designed as the successor protocol for IPv4 with an expanded addressing space. IPv4, which has been in use since 1982, is in the final stages of exhausting its unallocated address space, but still carries most Internet traffic.
The Belgian National Internet eXchange (BNIX) is an internet exchange point operated by the Belgian national research network BELNET. Created in 1995, it is one of the charter members of Euro-IX, the European Internet Exchange Association.
The P-GRADE Grid Portal was software for web portals to manage the life-cycle of executing a parallel application in grid computing. It was developed by the MTA SZTAKI Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Systems (LPDS) at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary, from around 2005 through 2010.
Elia is a Belgian transmission system operator for high-voltage electricity, located in Brussels, Belgium. It operates in Belgium and Germany. The company transmits electricity from generators to distribution system operators, which then supply SMEs and homes. Elia also has contracts with major industrial users that directly connect to its high-voltage grid.
Cloudflare, Inc. is an American company that provides content delivery network services, cloud cybersecurity, DDoS mitigation, and ICANN-accredited domain registration services. Cloudflare's headquarters are in San Francisco, California. According to The Hill, Cloudflare is used by more than 20 percent of the Internet for its web security services, as of 2022.
The State Archives is the institution which preserves the national archives of Belgium. It is a research institute of the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office (Belspo) under the Belgian Federal Government.
In Belgium, open access to scholarly communication accelerated after 2007 when the University of Liège adopted its first open-access mandate. The "Brussels Declaration" for open access was signed by officials in 2012.
Events in the year 2021 in Belgium.
DDoS-Guard is a Russian Internet infrastructure company which provides DDoS protection and web hosting services. Researchers and journalists have alleged that many of DDoS-Guard's clients are engaged in criminal activity, and investigative reporter Brian Krebs reported in January 2021 that a "vast number" of the websites hosted by DDoS-Guard are "phishing sites and domains tied to cybercrime services or forums online". Some of DDoS-Guard's notable clients have included the Palestinian Islamic militant nationalist movement Hamas, American alt-tech social network Parler, and various groups associated with the Russian state.
Killnet is a pro-Russia hacker group known for its DoS and DDoS attacks towards government institutions and private companies in several countries during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The group is thought to have been formed sometime around March 2022.
