Jakarta:

A cyberattack on Indonesia’s national data centre compromised hundreds of government offices and caused long delays at the capital’s main airport, with the hacker demanding an $8 million ransom, officials said Monday.

Long queues formed at immigration gates at Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport last week 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 told reporters on Monday, adding a dark web hacker had demanded a $8 million ransom.

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 United States, Britain and Australia last month unveiled sanctions against the leader of LockBit, which they accuse of extorting billions of dollars from thousands of victims.

The group was responsible for a quarter of all ransomware attacks worldwide last year, and has 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.

Indonesia has a weak cyber security record, with poor online literacy and frequent leaks.

In 2021 during the Covid-19 pandemic, researchers for encryption provider vpnMentor revealed the data of 1.3 million users of a government test-and-trace app had been compromised.

The reveal came just months after the data of more than 200 million participants of the National Health Care and Social Security Agency (BPJS Kesehatan) was allegedly leaked by hackers.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Jakarta:

A volcano in eastern Indonesia erupted on Monday, spewing a huge ash tower more than five kilometres (three miles) into the sky after authorities raised its alert level to the second-highest last week.

No damage or casualties were immediately reported but images showed a column of ash soaring into the sky on Halmahera island in North Maluku province.

Authorities said it reached more than five kilometres above the volcano’s peak, one of the biggest eruptions in recent months.

The grey-black ash column was observed with “thick intensity, leaning towards the west,” Geology Agency head Muhammad Wafid said in a statement Monday.

Wafid urged nearby residents to wear facemasks and glasses when going outdoors to protect against falling volcanic ash.

The volcano erupted on Saturday on a smaller scale, spewing lava, belching ash several kilometres into the night sky, and causing lightning.

The alert level remained at the second-highest of a four-tiered system on Monday after authorities raised it last week, with an exclusion zone between three and five kilometres (two to three miles) around the volcano’s crater.

Ibu is one of Indonesia’s most active volcanos, erupting more than 21,000 times last year.

Geology Agency official Sofyan Primulyana said Ibu recorded an average of 58 eruptions per day in 2023.

Indonesia, a vast archipelago nation, experiences frequent seismic and volcanic activity due to its position on the Pacific “Ring of Fire”.

Last month, Mount Ruang in North Sulawesi province erupted more than half a dozen times, forcing thousands of residents of nearby islands to evacuate and it remains at the highest alert level.

All of the 800 or so residents of Ruang island will be permanently relocated.

 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)