Indonesia Rejects $8M Ransom After Cyberattack: Indonesia’s Jakarta — A hacking organisation has gained access to Indonesia’s national data centre and is requesting a $8 million ransom, which the government claims it will not provide.
Samuel Abrijani Pangerapan, the director general of informatics applications with the Communications and Informatics Ministry, stated that since last Thursday, the cyberattack has interfered with the operations of over 200 government entities on a national and regional scale.
Immigration services at airports and other locations are back operational, for example, but Pangerapan informed reporters on Monday that work is still being done to restore other government services, like investment licencing.
Herlan Wijanarko, director of network and IT solutions at PT Telkom Indonesia, stated that the attackers have taken hostage data and offered a key for access in exchange for the $8 million ransom, without providing any other information.
According to Wijanarko, the business is looking into and attempting to crack the encryption that rendered the material unavailable in coordination with domestic and international authorities.
Journalists were informed by Minister of Communication and Informatics Budi Arie Setiadi that the government would not be covering the ransom.
Setiadi continued, “We have made every effort to complete recovery while the is presently doing forensics.
Hinsa Siburian, the agency’s chief, reported that samples of the Lockbit 3.0 ransomware had been found.
The current intrusion, according to Pratama Persadha, chairman of Indonesia’s Cybersecurity Research Institute, is the most serious in a string of ransomware attacks that have targeted businesses and government institutions in Indonesia since 2017.
“This ransomware attack was extraordinary because it disrupted the national data centre and required days to recover the system,” Persadha stated. “It demonstrates how poorly our cyber infrastructure and its server systems were managed.”
According to him, if the government possessed a reliable backup that could take over the national data center’s main server immediately in the event of a cyberattack, a ransomware attack would be pointless.
Ransomware targeted Indonesia’s central bank in 2022, but it had little effect on public services. In 2021, a cyberattack into the health ministry’s COVID-19 app revealed 1.3 million people’s personal information and medical records.
The biggest Islamic bank in Indonesia, Bank Syariah Indonesia, reported to have had 1.5 gigabytes of data stolen by a hacker organisation known as the LockBit ransomware, according to information obtained by Dark Tracer, an intelligence platform that tracks hostile activity in cyberspace.
