News Indonesia, suffering from a ransomware attack, discovers it has no backups — 'That's stupidity,' remarks astute government official

[Admin]

The devastation from a June cyberattack against Indonesia has been made much worse by a complete lack of data backups from one of the compromised data centers.

Indonesia, suffering from a ransomware attack, discovers it has no backups — 'That's stupidity,' remarks astute government official : Read more

 

[Amdlova]

Backup is stupid... But now you can build your civilization from scratch

 

[TechyIT223]

No Amdlova. Having a backup isn't stupidity though. In fact it's's an essential part of the process in a world where we have to deal with huge amounts of data.

This one would be detrimental to Indonesia in the long term. Im surprised to hear this news to be honest.

 

[COLGeek]

You would be shocked (maybe) at just how many government and business entities have no/inadequate backup solutions. Even multimillion/billion dollar companies and government offices at all levels.

Ineptness at its worst.

 

[Exploding PSU]

Nah, they stated that the bad actors had "realised the errors of their ways" and offered to hand out the decryption key for free in a shocking heel-face turn, fiction style hero arc.

It's so embarrassing. I mean, come on, even I back up my data regularly, and I don't know jack about tech (guess why I'm here)... How did they arrive at the maddening conclusion of "While the data center had the backup capacity to store the data, it wasn’t required. Many government agencies did not use the backup service because of budget constraints."

Budget constraints? Seriously? Whatever happened to that 60+ million AUD budget?

Please people, back up your data!

 

[nameless0ne]

Nah, they stated that the bad actors had "realised the errors of their ways" and offered to hand out the decryption key for free in a shocking heel-face turn, fiction style hero arc.

It's so embarrassing. I mean, come on, even I back up my data regularly, and I don't know jack about tech (guess why I'm here)... How did they arrive at the maddening conclusion of "While the data center had the backup capacity to store the data, it wasn’t required. Many government agencies did not use the backup service because of budget constraints."

Budget constraints? Seriously? Whatever happened to that 60+ million AUD budget?

Please people, back up your data!

What usually happens (even with those national data centers) is those that store the data (agencies) need to pay additional fees for their data to be backed up. We have this in our country as well - a national data center to aggregate data from multiple agencies. This helps with upkeep costs and better resource use. But you need to "share" the cost meaning all the services from the data center need to be paid for. And if laws do not require to have a data backup then any agency would need to budget this "un-required" cost.
All of this penny pinching and nearsightedness has lead to this situation.
One could say that the data center operator is to blame since the breach was on it's side. But they likely have contracts that absolve them from any backlash.