JAKARTA: A hacker has demanded an $8 million ransom after carrying out a cyberattack on Indonesia’s national data centre that compromised hundreds of government offices and caused long delays at the capital’s main airport, said officials on Monday.
Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport last week witnessed long queues at immigration gates after systems went down in the attack.
An official from the communications ministry said the cybercrime was conducted using software developed by Russian ransomware outfit LockBit.
The attack affected 210 institutions at the national and domestic levels, senior official Semuel Abrijani Pangerapan told media, adding a dark web hacker had sought an $8 million ransom.
He went on to say that immigration services were returning to normal and work was being done to restore affected services.
He said the authorities are still investigating the ransomware, known as Brain Cipher, which hit the government data.
LockBit and its affiliates have targeted governments, schools, hospitals and major companies, causing billions of dollars of damage.
The United States, Australia and Britain, last month imposed sanctions against the leader of LockBit, which they blame for extorting billions of dollars from thousands of victims.
According to the UK government, the group was responsible for a quarter of all cyber-attacks last year across the world and has extorted over $1 billion from thousands of victims globally.
The United States, Britain, France, Germany and China were the top five countries hit by LockBit, according to Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency.
In 2021 during the Covid-19 pandemic, researchers for encryption provider vpnMentor said the data of 1.3 million users in Indonesia had been compromised.
