ABC AU: Brazil’s health ministry says its website has been hacked, taking down several systems, including one with information about the national immunisation program and another used to issue digital vaccination certificates.
The government put off for a week implementing new health requirements for travellers arriving in Brazil due to the attack.
“The health ministry reports that in the early hours of Friday it suffered an incident that temporarily compromised some of its systems … which are currently unavailable,” it said in a statement on Friday.
Police said they were investigating the attack.
The alleged hackers, calling themselves Lapsus$ Group posted a message on the website saying that internal data had been copied and deleted.
“Contact us if you want the data back,” it said, in an apparent ransomware attack. more
Give us $500,000 and twenty-two lifetime vax certificates…
They did a full Brazillion on their data….
As common as ransomware attacks are now, it seemes to me that anyone tending critical data would, I don’t know, BACK IT UP, like you’ve had to do since the DAWN OF THE COMPUTER AGE because there’s a thousand ways to lose data with them WITHOUT malice; so you add in people actively trying to steal, then it becomes pretty hard to understand why you’re NOT prepared for it.
I know whereof I speak.
…my food plant, which also does military, got hit with one of these types of attacks (in my case it was “Evil Locker”, you’ll see how I could tell below) on our SCADA system for the majority of our process vessels, apparently because someone on second shift was bored and wanted to see naked women, and my R&D people got pissy about being able to remote it so I got overruled on keeping an air gap firewall.
Well, our IT department set up the Internet facing port and the rack storage away from the system, but didn’t take that avenue into account, and also didn’t realize that this PARTICULAR attack would follow mapped drives and encrypt THEM, too.
…so I came in that morning and had most of our retorts down because the night guys didn’t know what to do. The R&D chief, God rest his soul, did what HE could, but really didn’t get past establishing that the files we couldn’t get to had been given a .EVIL extension, and was inaccessible.
…well, I learned a long time ago that IT doesn’t understand tool computers, so I had a backup system that I had preloaded with the essentials and only needed linked to the printers and such, so I got spun up in about a half hour including preliminary testing and, obviously, NOT linking to the corrupt backup AND not hooking the Ethernet facing side up.
…anyway, we could run, but lost all the electronic process records we promised the Gubbmint we’d keep. Again, being the trusting soul I am, I kept my own OFFLINE backups but had dropped to every month, so it was good that the R&D guy kept some too and we were able to reconstruct and still had the printed records and chart recordings to satisfy.
…it was NEVER an option to PAY for decryption. You’re dealing with the SAME criminals that raped your system in the FIRST place, and you’re going to trust THEM with sending them money blindly AND download something ELSE they provide onto your sensitive systems?!? I don’t THINK SO, Tim!
…so lesson learned, I keep my own weekly backups and the Internet is UNPLUGGED from the system, AND the USB drives disabled just in case someone gets stupid with a memory stick. But the Company keeps trying to expose the system for convenience, and I have to keep reminding them that’s more convenient for hackers, too.
As these Brazilian fellows have learned.
They’re out there, ALL the time. I could go over a BUNCH of other attacks I’ve been through, but the ONLY common protection is to back up FREQUENTLY, have spare HARDWARE dated to your software as well, control INTERNAL access to a select few, monitor THOSE closely, AND NO DAMN INTERNET ACCESS EVER!
…otherwise, get used to this.
It isn’t going away.
Ever.
The most likely way to do this is internally. I guarantee you that many of the worker bees inside these “health” ministries/departments throughout this world are fed up with this Branch COVIDian bullshit as much as the rest of ordinary humanity. They work inside the sausage factory and know how full of shit the people running it really are.
😉
We lost your vaccine info you all need to get re-vaccinated.
Cool, here’s a taste of your own medicine! Your computers got the jab and met the slab. LMAO! Someone was more clever than the jabbers and their IT team.
Average serf/citizen, “Awwww…..you lost our jab/vaxx data? Awwww……….too bad. We’ve ALL been vaxxed. You’ll just have to trust us and take our word for it. You’ll just have to re-enter everything manually and assume that we’re all vaxxed.”
Can’t say I would be disappointed if something like that happened here.