PDNS Gets Ransomware, Adviser Observers Should Be Third-Party PDN Management

Illustration of ransomware attacks (photo: freepic)

JAKARTA - On Thursday, June 20, immigration services were disrupted. The National Cyber and Crypto Agency (BSSN) confirmed that the disturbance was caused by a ransomware attack at the Temporary National Data Center.

According to findings from the BSSN team, this ransomware variant is a new variant called Brain Cipher, which is a new variant of mutation from the Lockbit 3.0 ransomware.

Responding to this issue, cybersecurity observer from Vaccine.com, Alfons Tanujaya, said that PDN servers should be managed by third parties or vendors.

According to him, the Directorate General of Informatics Applications (Ditjen Aptika) of the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, which is currently responsible for PDN, can only be a supervisor.

"Whatever the name is, it will always be new. Maybe it needs to be evaluated for vendor election methods, if possible, Kominfo will become a pure supervisor and not be involved in operations because referees should not be players," said Alfons when contacted by VOI on Monday, June 24.

Thus, all data management can be submitted to competent parties such as local cloud providers, such as Biznet, CBN or others within the cloud management association.

"So if there is anything, this cloud manager can be held accountable either financially or legally. If there are consequences like that, of course the PDN cloud manager will not be careless like today," he said.

Alfons also questioned how the PDN admin could be careless, so cyber attacks emerged to the most important location in data storage from Ministries/Institutions in the country.

"How come the admin has been missed like this. That must be a question and evaluation. How come the disaster recovery and business continuity can be this bad," he said further.

For information, due to this ransomware attack, there were 210 affected agencies. The perpetrators also asked for a ransom of 8 million US dollars or around Rp. 131.3 billion.