Vanuatu, a South Pacific Ocean nation consisting of around 80 islands suffered a cyber attack a month ago. The attacked gained entry onto the government systems via a phishing activity. The malware crashed nearly all government email and websites archives. This resulted in government departments struggling to stay connected, and has resulted in impromptu solutions being implemented for communication between agencies and departments. Some of those solutions include using private Gmail accounts, communicating using facebook and Twitter, using personal laptops, pen and paper and type writers. And also using the online Yellow pages or the hard copy phone directory to locate government phone numbers. Fortunately most departments were still using local computer drives to store data, as opposed to web servers or the cloud. One of the reasons why they haven’t been able to recover from the cyber attack is due to the lack of expertise to do so, and them needing outside assistance.
This segment was created for the It’s 5:05 podcast