The Vanuatu government, a small island country located south of the Pacific Ocean, was compromised by a ransomware attack last week. According to government employees, the attack has spread their emails across their government addresses.
In addition, the ransomware campaign has temporarily shut down the entire Vanuatu government for more than ten days. The attack has also prompted all government agencies to resort to the old working model, which uses a manual process of pen and paper transactions.
The attackers have also disrupted the internal systems of the small island nation as the officials could not access their emails.
The Vanuatu government has shut down after the ransomware event.
Every sector of the Vanuatu government, such as the parliament, police, and prime minister’s office, has experienced the effects of the attack since the intranet was down. Furthermore, the operations within the country became stagnant as the miscreants also shut down the databases of hospitals and schools.
Currently, the tiny archipelago is home to approximately 315,000 people. These people are now left in the dark as they need help to complete simple tasks such as invoicing bills, getting licenses, acquiring visas, and paying taxes.
Employees have also received cheques instead of electronic transfers in their bank accounts. Some agencies revealed that they had to go from one department to another to retrieve legitimate signatures for payrolls and cheques.
Researchers have yet to uncover the origin and cause of the ransomware attack. It also needs to be clarified what the government employed for the cybersecurity defence.
Cybersecurity experts claimed that the whole system of the Vanuatu government was centralised and hosted on its servers, which is a fundamental security vulnerability. Numerous experts suggest that the country upgrade their cybersecurity solutions to mitigate any possible follow-up attacks soon.
Currently, the only choice Vanuatu country has is to seek help from their neighbour country, Australia, to aid them in building a proper defence against malicious cyberattacks. Researchers have continued to study and find clues for the ransomware’s motives and causes.
