This week Indonesia confirmed their National Data Center had fallen victim to the LockBit 3.0 ransomware. As a result, 210 central and local government agency services were disrupted and to this day have not fully recovered. The hacking group handed over an $8 million ransom to return the locked data but the Indonesian government says they won't pay it.
Therefore, all affected services are expected to be restored by mid-August. At the time of writing, only 2% of data locked by LockBit has been successfully recovered. Various Indonesian government agencies are now pointing fingers at each other as the cause of this attack. Indonesian Communications Minister Budi Arie Setiadi blamed the affected government agencies for not performing backups regularly and relying on his ministry to perform backups on their behalf.
This problem became serious because the data of the National Data Center was found not to perform backups regularly. If a backup is performed, service can be restored within a day.
Last May the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) filed an indictment against Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev who was among the developers of LockBit. The FBI offered a reward of $10 million (~RM48 million) for information that would lead to his arrest. So far it is estimated that there are more than 2000 LockBit victims around the world with as much as $500 million ransom paid.