The Papua New Guinea's Finance Department has been attacked by Ransomware infiltration forcing all systems to shutdown. The hackers who infiltered the system demanded large amount of money before they (hackers) could restore the system back. However, according to the country's finance minister , Sir John Pundari, the finance system was restored back without paying any money to the hackers. He released the following statement after the cyberattack.
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| Sir John Pundari, |
The Government Financial System suffered a cyber-attack in the form of a Ransomware infiltrating our core server at 1.00am on Friday, 22nd of October 2021. As a result of the ransomware infiltration, Department of Finances IT network was compromised. The department immediately took precautionary steps by shutting down the network systems.
The Department has now managed to fully restore the system however because of the risk, we are playing safe by not allowing full usage of the affected network. While we progress into cleaning up the server environment, we have put in temporary measures in place to control user activities on the network. These includes all Government Departments and Agencies having access to commit and process cheques using a controlled environment within Vulupindi Haus.
All provinces and districts will also have access to commit funds, through a controlled environment as a temporary arrangement.
The Department is conscious of the security and integrity of its data thus, restoration of services to all government agencies, including at the sub-national level will be done gradually with added security layers to prevent to prevent similar attacks in the future, bearing in mind security of individual networks.
At this stage, I wish to state clearly that the Government's Financial System has been fully restored. Department of Finance did not pay any ransom to the hacker or any of its third party agents.
We have managed to restore the Finance Management System backonline. The Government and the people of Papua New Guinea can rest be assured that all tiers of Government Financial services will continue to operate as usual.