Cyber Attack Disrupted Indonesia’s National Data Center and Airport Operations Disrupted
A cyberattack on Indonesia’s national data center on Monday compromised hundreds of government offices, including Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport. This resulted in people experiencing a long delays .
On Monday, officials informed about an $8 million ransom being demanded by the hacker.
Last week, immigration services at the airport were disrupted by this attack using LockBit software developed by Russian ransomware group.
According to Semuel Abrijani Pangerapan, a senior official from the communications ministry, the attack affected 210 local and national institutions.
He also confirmed that a hacker on the dark web had demanded an $8 million ransom.
By Monday morning, immigration services had begun to get back to normalcy even as other services were still being recovered. The authorities are continuing their investigations of Brain Cipher, the ransomware that encrypted government data making it inaccessible.
LockBit and its affiliates have targeted governments, hospitals, schools, and major companies. And caused their victims billions of dollars in damage. While also extracting tens of millions in ransoms. They encrypt files and data with Ransomware which immobilizes a victim IT system until a ransom is paid.
Sanctions
Sanctions were imposed on the leader of LockBit by the US, UK and Australia last month, who accused it of extorting billions from thousands of victims.
According to the British government, in 2020 alone LockBit accounted for a quarter of all ransomware attacks worldwide and extorted more than a million dollars globally.
LockBit, according to Europol-the law enforcement agency of the European Union-was responsible for cyber-attacks on five countries namely; US, UK, France, Germany and China.
Indonesia has poor cybersecurity record with low online literacy rates and regular data leaks. During Covid-19 pandemic in 2021 vpnMentor researchers discovered that data belonging to about 1.3 million users using an Indonesian government’s test-and-trace app had been hacked. This came after over 200 million records belonging to Indonesia’s National Health Care and Social Security Agency (BPJS Kesehatan) were leaked.
AFP
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