Officials announced on Monday, June 24 a cyberattack on Indonesia’s national data center compromised hundreds of government offices and caused significant delays at the capital’s main airport. The hacker is demanding an $8 million ransom.
An official from the communications ministry stated that long queues formed at immigration gates at Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport last week after systems went down due to the attack. The attack was carried out using software developed by the Russian ransomware group LockBit..
“The attack affected 210 institutions at the national and local levels, adding a dark web hacker had demanded a $8 million ransom,”senior official Semuel Abrijani Pangerapan said on Monday, June 24.
He added that immigration services were returning to normal on Monday, June 24 morning and work was being done to restore other affected services.
Authorities are still investigating the ransomware, known as Brain Cipher, which made government data inaccessible due to encryption, he said.
LockBit and its affiliates have targeted governments major companies, schools and hospitals resulting in billions of dollars in damages and extracting tens of millions in ransoms from their victims.
Typically, their programs once inserted by the ransomware operator into a target’s IT systems are manipulated to freeze the target’s files and data through encryption.
Last month, the United States, Britain and Australia unveiled sanctions against the leader of LockBit, accusing them of extorting billions of dollars from thousands of victims.
“The group was responsible for a quarter of all ransomware attacks worldwide last year, and has extorted over $1 billion from thousands of victims globally,” according to the UK government.
According to Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, the top five countries hit by LockBit were the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and China.
Indonesia has a weak cybersecurity record, characterized by poor online literacy and frequent data leaks.
In 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers from the encryption provider virtual private network Mentor revealed that the data of 1.3 million users of a government test-and-trace app had been compromised.
This revelation came just months after the data of more than 200 million participants in the National Health Care and Social Security Agency (BPJS Kesehatan) was allegedly leaked by hackers.
Comments