A cyberattack on Indonesia’s national data centre has caused disruptions to hundreds of government offices and long delays at the capital’s main airport, with the hacker demanding an $8 million ransom, authorities said Monday.
Long queues formed at immigration gates at Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport last week after a hacker using software developed by Russian ransomware outfit LockBit brought the system down, a communications ministry official said.
Senior official Samuel Abrijani Pangerpan told reporters on Monday that the attack had affected “210 institutions nationally and locally”, adding that a dark web hacker had demanded an $8 million ransom.
He said immigration services would be normal by Monday morning and work was being done to restore other affected services.
He said officials were still investigating a ransomware called Brain Cipher, which makes government data inaccessible because of encryption.
LockBit and its affiliates have targeted governments, major companies, schools, and hospitals, causing billions of dollars in losses and extorting hundreds of millions of dollars in ransom from victims.
Typically, their programs – once placed on a target’s IT systems by a ransomware operator – are manipulated to freeze the target’s files and data through encryption.
The United States, Britain and Australia last month announced sanctions against the leader of LockBit, whom they accused of extorting billions of dollars from thousands of victims.
According to the British government, the group was responsible for one-quarter of all ransomware attacks worldwide last year, and has “extorted more than $1 billion from thousands of victims worldwide.”
According to Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, the top five countries affected by LockBit were the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and China.
Indonesia has a weak cybersecurity record, poor online literacy and frequent leaks.
During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, researchers at encryption provider vpnMentor revealed that data on 1.3 million users of a government test-and-trace app had been compromised.
The revelation comes just months after data on more than 200 million participants of the National Healthcare and Social Security Agency (BPJS Kesehatan) was allegedly leaked by hackers.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)