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Cyber attackers have gained access to Indonesia's data centre, demanding a $8m as ransom, officials said on Monday.
The cyber attackers compromised hundreds of government offices and caused long delays at the capital’s main airport.
Long queues formed at immigration gates at Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport after systems went down in the attack, carried out using software developed by Russian ransomware outfit LockBit, an official from the communications ministry said.
The attack “affected 210 institutions at the national and local levels,” senior official Semuel Abrijani Pangerapan revealed.
He added that immigration services were returning to normal on Monday 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, causing billions of dollars of damage and extracting tens of millions in ransoms from victims.
Typically, their programmes — once inserted by the ransomware operator into a target’s IT systems — are manipulated to freeze, via encryption, the target’s files and data.
The group LockBit was responsible for a quarter of all ransomware attacks worldwide last year, and had extorted “over $1 billion from thousands of victims globally,” according to the UK government.
The top five countries hit by LockBit were the United States, Britain, France, Germany and China, according to Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency.
AFP
