Hackers disappear with Brazil’s vaccination data after attack on Health Ministry

“This website remains absolutely shit and nothing has been done to correct it.” So wrote hackers on the Brazilian Health Ministry’s homepage back in February, during the second attack to have occurred during the pandemic. Only three months earlier, electronic databases of Brazil’s public health system (SUS) – as well as work emails – had been left inaccessible for several days. “I couldn’t even open files stored on a flash drive. It was as if everything was locked,” one civil servant told The Brazilian Report at the time. 

“Fix this crappy website or next time, data of those responsible for this mess will be exposed,” hackers warned on their second strike. Apparently, government officials did little to remedy the situation, with a third hack now hitting the Health Ministry today.

As of the early hours of December 10, all of the department’s systems became inaccessible to citizens and authorities alike. 

Vaccination documents proved impossible to retrieve, leaving residents of Salvador unable to provide proof of vaccination – required to board buses in the city. In Brasília, Acre, and Piauí, meanwhile, citizens were unable to receive second and third doses of the vaccine. Local governments across the country were unable to log new Covid-19 data.

With vaccination data disappearing from public records, the government decided to postpone the enforcement of new rules on...