Hacking of Dept of Justice systems causes disruption

GEORGE NEWS - The September ransomware attack on the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development has had a huge ripple effect on the country that was also felt in George.

The hack led to a massive crisis, causing major disruptions to all divisions including most online services, the payment of child maintenance to beneficiaries, the Office of the Master of the High Court and the electronic recording of court proceedings, as well as the web portal used by transcribers to download court recordings for transcription purposes.

"My wife's sister died in August. Since then she has been trying to get a letter from the Master's office to be her appointed executor of estate. They cannot give her that letter because their system was hacked more than eight weeks ago and they are still offline," a reader told George Herald earlier this week.

During the attack, the department's IT systems were encrypted, making them unavailable to officials and the public, and affecting all of the department's electronic systems.

However, most services have apparently been restored recently and according to the department, successful measures have been taken over the past few weeks to recover from the attack. This has involved work by department officials, industry specialists and advisers from various organs of state to contain the spread of the malware and reactivate online services in a safe and secure manner.

Spokesperson for the department Steve Mahlangu said that most of the recordings are intact, and able to sync back to the central repository. "Where courts are still experiencing challenges, a special capacity has been deployed to attend to queries on a case-by-case basis," he said. Considerable progress had been made in the restoration of the administrative system used by all courts - particularly the Office of the Master of the High Court.

"Parts of the system are already accessible, such as curatorship, and the online portals used for historic searches. More work will be done in the next few days to complete the process of bringing back online functionality in respect of trusts, deceased estates and insolvencies," said Mahlangu.

A high-level assessment on the 1 200 files containing personal information that may have been compromised during the attack has been finalised.

They have now strengthened security measures to protect sensitive personal information under their custodianship. Measures include upgrading of ICT security infrastructure and ensuring more stringent access control.

If you have experienced any problems at court or at the Office of the Master of the High Court recently, it might be because their systems were hacked in September. Fortunately, according to the Department of Justice, most of the system functionality has been restored.