Hackers take national data hostage, demand ransom from Indonesian government

Samuel Abrijani Pangerapan, head of information technology applications at the Indonesian Ministry of Communications and Informatics, said the cyberattack has disrupted services at more than 200 government agencies at both the national and local levels since June 20.

On June 24, Mr. Pangerapan told reporters that some government services have resumed while efforts to restore other services, such as investment licensing, continue.

Communications and Informatics Minister Budi Arie Setiadi told reporters that the government would not pay the ransom. “We have tried our best to recover the data while the National Cyber ​​and Electronic Money Agency is currently conducting an investigation,” Setiadi added. The head of the Indonesian National Cyber ​​and Electronic Money Agency, Hinsa Siburian, said they had detected samples of the Lockbit 3.0 ransomware.

The cyberattack was the most serious in a series of ransomware attacks targeting Indonesian government agencies and companies since 2017, said Pratama Persadha, chairman of the Indonesian Cybersecurity Research Institute. “The days it took to restore systems and the disruption to the national data center show that this ransomware attack is unusual. It shows that our network infrastructure and server systems are not well-managed,” Persadha said.

He argued that a ransomware attack would be pointless if the government had good data backups that could automatically take over the main server of the national data center in a cyber attack.