The President of Indonesia, Joko Widodo, has ordered an audit of Government data centres after learning the majority of the data affected by a cyberattack was not backed up.
Development and Finance Controller (BPKP) of Indonesia, Muhammad Yusuf Ateh, said the audit will cover ‘governance and the financial aspect’. Head of the National Cyber and Crypto Agency known as BSSN, Hinsa Siburian, said 98% of the Government data held in one of the two compromised data centres were not backed up.
“Generally we see the main problem is governance and there is no back-up,” said Siburian at a parliamentary hearing.
Some lawmakers refused to accept this explanation.
“If there is no back up, that’s not a lack of governance … That is stupidity,” said Meutya Hafid, Chair of the Commission overseeing the incident.
Minister of Communication and Information Technology of Indonesia, Budi Arie Setiadi, said the ministry had the option to back-up capacity at the data centres, however it was the choice of the Government agencies to engage with these facilities.
Budi Arie Setiadi added agencies did not back up data due too constraints to the budget, however, this will soon be made mandatory.
The Ransomware Attack on Indonesian Data Centres
Hundreds of Government agencies in Indonesia have been disrupted after hacking group, Lockbit, used an advanced piece of malicious software called Lockbit 3.0 to launch a cyberattack and breach cyber defences.
Immigration checkpoints stopped working and manual checks had to be undertaken, leading to long queues at airports across the nation. The head of the Immigration service moved its data centre other than a private cloud server after the system went down.
Soon after the attack, cyber criminals demanded an £6.3 million ($8 million) ransom in return for the stolen data. The Indonesia Government refused to pay the ransom, with efforts now being made to break the locked data. While some services have returned to normal, such as airport immigration, others remain impacted.
