Indonesia's national data centre suffers ransomware attack

Indonesia's national data centre, Pusat Data Nasional (PDN), operated by the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, has been hit by a ransomware attack impacting 210 databases of central and regional institutions. The attackers demanded a US$8 million ransom, which the government refused. The National Cyber and Crypto Agency identified the ransomware as Brain Cipher, a variant of LockBit 3.0. The attack led to service disruptions at immigration checkpoints and licensing services. In response, immigration data has been relocated to Amazon Web Services due to the PDN's inability to recover. The breach is being investigated by various agencies, including the BSSN and Indonesian cyber police force. As of June 24, some affected services have been restored. This incident serves as a lesson to enhance mitigation strategies to prevent future attacks. Indonesia had been working on establishing four national data centres to support digital initiatives, with two temporary centres already operational in Jakarta and Surabaya, the latter being affected by the ransomware attack.