Hacking of Brazil’s health system: no official data on coronavirus for 25 days

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Brazil, the South American country most affected by the coronavirus pandemic, registered 18,759 cases and 175 deaths in the last 24 hours, a much lower number than Argentina, which broke the record of daily cases this Tuesday.

However, the nation with the largest population in South America is not providing the actual figures of COVID-19 cases in the country.

On December 10, Brazil’s official system for calculating the evolution of the coronavirus in the country suffered a hacking that has not yet been solved.

Due to this cybernetic blackout, the Brazilian Ministry of Health website and the ConnectSUS application, which contains the country’s vaccination data, remain inoperative.

Therefore, for 25 days, there has been no access to the actual numbers of Covid-19 cases and deaths in the country.

Who is responsible for the computer “blackout”?

The massive hacking was carried out by “LAPSUS$ GROUP”, which took responsibility for the crime with a message posted on the downed pages: “Contact us if you want to recover the data”.

According to the Health Ministry in a statement, the attack compromised the system of the National Immunization Program, which prevented the issuance of the National Certificate of Vaccination against COVID-19.

An important fact is that the attack took place one day before the date on which proof of vaccination was to be required for travelers to enter the country, which had to be postponed for seven days.

The Minister of Health, Marcelo Queiroga, stated that he had a backup and that it was a matter of time before everything returned to normal.

Two days after the hacking, the population’s vaccination records were recovered, but 24 hours later, a new attack compromised the agency’s computer structure that allowed access to Covid-19’s daily data in Brazil and has not yet been resolved.

What happened to the daily coronavirus reports in Brazil?

In this context, the media try to keep the figures updated with the documentation provided by provincial governments.

But the numbers they provide, thanks to a research team made up of the leading journalistic groups in the country, do not reflect reality.

Not all states report cases and deaths daily. Some state governments reported problems in collecting data from the Ministry’s systems.

That is the case of São Paulo, where Governor João Doria explained the difficulties: “It was not possible to extract data from the federal government systems, where Covid-19 cases are reported. This impacted the publication of updated statistics”.

Thanks to the hacking, the government of Jair Bolsonaro has been relieved of the duty to inform the inhabitants of the national epidemiological situation.

For this reason, experts cannot assess the actual situation in the country and take measures in the face of the appearance of the Omicron variant worldwide.