KINGSTON, Jamaica, CMC – An investigation has been launched following a cyber attack on the Office of the Registrar General (ORG), formerly Registrar General’s Department.
According to investigators, the cyber attack was an attempt to disrupt systems and gain access to personal data.
Consultant and cybersecurity expert Richard Weir, in an interview with Radio Jamaica News, said the attack has prompted a full-scale investigation and is being attributed to a cybercriminal group that has been targeting several Jamaican companies.
The attack took place on Sunday, August 24.
“Specifically, the infrastructure with the line of business applications, such as the applications tracking system… that’s the one that generates the certificates. We immediately launched our investigation, and we went into containment mode. We wanted to ensure that it didn’t impact any other system, as it appeared to be confined to a particular area of our network, one of our segments, which was affecting the infrastructure supporting those systems. We don’t have any evidence right now of direct interaction with the systems themselves, just the underlying infrastructure,” he noted.
Weir said the agency swiftly engaged its response mechanism, went into containment, and disabled certain services to mitigate fallout from the external attacks.
He further explained that similar attacks have been concentrated across companies that handle personal data as well as health services globally.
However, he stated that for security purposes, the name of this cybercriminal group will not be made public, given the potential implications.
“We won’t put that out there for anybody to be able to follow these guys. I can say at this point, we’ve identified one of the groups that has been active in Jamaica over the last year or so. So I’ve had the displeasure of coming up on this particular group in other companies locally, not just in Jamaica alone, but targeting certain types of entities globally,” he explained, adding that these entities usually have health-related data.
The ORG is Jamaica’s sole repository of birth, death, marriage, and fetal death records.
While most of the critical services have been restored, the agency is cautiously and strategically phasing in its remaining operations that were taken offline.
Meanwhile, the National Identification and Registration Authority, under which the ORG falls, states that its cybersecurity systems remain robust and secure.
It is assuring citizens and stakeholders that their data is secure and that the integrity of the National Identification System remains uncompromised.
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