Health ministry systems hacked after Telecom leak

The Ministry of Health and Social Services’ service and stock-tracking systems have been targeted after last week’s Telecom Namibia (TN) data leak.

Executive director of health and social services Ben Nangombe confirmed this on Tuesday.

“The work that has been done revealed that the attack did breach one of our dashboards, namely our pharmaceutical management information system,” he said.

Nangombe said this system is a web-based platform that visualises and presents aggregate data on essential medicine stock status and the number of patients enrolled for particular services at healthcare facilities and nationally.

He, however, said patients’ personal information is not breached, but only information on how many citizens make use of certain services the ministry offers.

Nangombe said the ministry became aware of a possible attack on its systems on 13 December. Following that, it took action to try and establish the magnitude of the breach.

“And the information contained in this particular dashboard is information that we usually report on in terms of the interventions we are implementing. . .

“The dashboard is used to support pharmaceutical decision-making,” Nangombe said.

The initial findings showed the dashboard remained operational after the breach until after the server was manually shut down by ministry officials, he said.

This comes as TN experienced a security breach over the weekend that saw the personal information of over 619 000 TN clients being leaked online.

The over 626.3GB of confidential information leaked on Saturday includes data from the Office of the President, medical records, airlines, regional and town councils, universities, mining companies, car dealerships and restaurants.

The government has launched an investigation into the matter.

Nangombe said the next move is to strengthen the ministry’s systems’ security and to adopt stronger cyberpolicies to prevent such incidents.

“This dashboard was accessed because it was published on the internet. It will be taken off the internet and into a new environment,” he said.