Like most countries, Brazil also maintains digital databases to store information about vaccinations and other health-related issues in the country. However, multiple health data management systems in the country were taken down recently in a cyberattack.
Reuters reports that the hackers, who call themselves "Lapsus$ group", posted a message on the government health ministry website claiming that all internal data has been copied and deleted. Their demand was that that the health ministry should contact them if they need their data back, indicating a potential ransomware attack. The note also included Telegram and email information that has now been removed, although the website is still down.
Brazil"s health ministry issued a statement saying:
The health ministry reports that in the early hours of Friday it suffered an incident that temporarily compromised some of its systems [...] which are currently unavailable.
As of writing, the government has been unable to restore its systems and it"s unclear if the data can be recovered or if it has been permanently lost. The government ContactSUS app which provides vaccination certificates seems to have lost its data too.
As a part of its foreign traveling process, the Brazilian government was supposed to impose a five-day quarantine on unvaccinated travelers followed by a COVID-19 test from today. However, in light of recent events, the government has postponed this process by a week.
It is currently unclear how the attackers managed to compromise multiple systems, but we"ll likely find out more details in the coming days.