With hackers having broken into Dutch certificate authority DigiNotar, the Dutch government Tuesday disclosed its intentions of widening its probe into the Internet security breach, in order to ascertain whether the hackers had compromised the private information of the Dutch citizens who extensively use the online option of filing income tax returns.

The hacking scandal in the Netherlands – which incidentally is among the most digitally advanced countries in Europe – came to light last week, with DigiNotar revealing that hackers had broken into its systems in July and had issued fraudulent digital certificates, which are used for verifying the authenticity of Web sites.

DigiNotar, the government security contractor at the center of the hacking controversy, has been asked by the Dutch data protection agency to report whether the security breach had affected the integrity of special digital certificates which guarantee the authenticity of interactions with government computers.

Revealing that the request for the information was made on Friday, a spokeswoman for the data protection agency told The Hague that the agency was hopeful that DigiNotar will respond “within a few days.”

Meanwhile, a recently-released independent report Fox-IT - a company that the Dutch government has hired for investigating the breaches -, has traced the origin of the DigiNotar security breach to Iran. The report said: “DigiNotar found evidence on July 28th that rogue certificates were verified by Internet addresses originating from Iran.”