Moala says the question being asked of the government is: why wasn't there a backup system? Photo: 123RF
It has now been three weeks since cyber hackers took down the Tonga Ministry of Health's National Health Information system.
Ever since, staff at the country's hospitals have had to rely on whatever handwritten notes are available when seeing patients.
A cyber security expert said the cyber breach and subsequent demand for compensation are a "wake-up call for the Pacific".
We asked our Tonga correspondent Kalafi Moala for a progress report on the recovery.
(The transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.)
Kalafi Moala: When the problem happened, Tonga had to reach out to Australia. They had a group of experts that arrived in Tonga quite quickly, and they are heading up the search to try to, firstly, identify who was responsible for the hacking, and to try to do some restoration to the database that has been lost. So, that has been ongoing work.
But the latest announcement from the Ministry of Health is that they have identified the group that have done the hacking - a group that demanded a ransom payment of a million dollars, but they can't identify any individual, since there is a group overseas that have been doing that.
Don Wiseman: Are they saying, where overseas this group is?
KM: No, they are not. They are unable to say that. They just said a group from outside of Tonga.
DW: The government had promised to take action against these people. It's not going to be able to, is it?
KM: No, particularly you have a group without a face or without an actual location.
I think the big part of the work that they are doing is trying to restore some of the data. And the latest announcement is, yes, they are doing that bit by bit, and that is the latest we have heard.
DW: Are people able now to rely on the hospital records, or do they still have to take their own records in when they have a hospital visit?
KM: I think that that is one of the big issues that came up, the question was why wasn't there a backup system? I guess they just did not expect that one day the record are going to be hacked.
But why wasn't there a backup system, if it failed, and that is what they are doing right now as well; trying to have a backup system that could not be hacked, so that if the system is hacked, at least they can fall back on that.
DW: It's been suggested that things have moved very quickly in terms of digital access in places like Tonga, and this is part of the reason that this has happened, that the country wasn't ready for something like this?
KM: No, it definitely was not. And things moved quickly, but it moved quickly south, unfortunately. I think that helped Tonga to be able to look at backup systems and other securities, and this Australian group that's here in Tonga is helping them to establish
that.
DW: Is the government looking at other government departments to ensure that there is a greater degree of security around their data.
KM: That is a very good question because just over the last two to three weeks, there have been all kinds of announcements that have come in, for example, from the Registry of Births and Marriages and all of it, they have been saying that now you've got to do that digitally now. That there has been a complete change over to online registrations, and you cannot do that on paper anymore. And so right in the midst of all of that announcements and public declaration was when this thing of health took place, and so people are kind of hesitant. They're asking a lot of questions, Are we, are we moving in the right direction, or, you know? Tonga, of course, being a very small place, you're not talking about millions of people going online to register. We're we're only a population of just a little over 100,000, so there are a lot of questions surrounding that, but I'm sure that what has happened to the Ministry of Health that's putting into alert the other government departments that are going digital.
