An in­ves­ti­ga­tion has been launched fol­low­ing a cy­ber at­tack on Ja­maica’s Of­fice of the Reg­is­trar Gen­er­al (ORG), for­mer­ly known as the Reg­is­trar Gen­er­al’s De­part­ment.

Ac­cord­ing to in­ves­ti­ga­tors, the cy­ber at­tack was an at­tempt to dis­rupt sys­tems and gain ac­cess to per­son­al da­ta.

Con­sul­tant and cy­ber se­cu­ri­ty ex­pert Richard Weir, in an in­ter­view with Ra­dio Ja­maica News, said the at­tack has prompt­ed “a full-scale in­ves­ti­ga­tion”, and is be­ing at­trib­uted to “a cy­ber crim­i­nal group that has been tar­get­ing sev­er­al Ja­maican com­pa­nies.”

The at­tack took place on Sun­day, Au­gust 24, 2025.

“Specif­i­cal­ly, the in­fra­struc­ture with the line of busi­ness ap­pli­ca­tions, such as the ap­pli­ca­tions track­ing sys­tem … that’s the one that gen­er­ates the cer­tifi­cates,” Weir ex­plained.

“We im­me­di­ate­ly launched our in­ves­ti­ga­tion and we went in con­tain­ment mode. So we want­ed to en­sure that it didn’t im­pact any oth­er sys­tem be­cause it ap­peared that it was con­fined to a par­tic­u­lar area of our net­work, one of our seg­ments, im­pact­ing the in­fra­struc­ture sup­port­ing those sys­tems. We don’t have any ev­i­dence right now of di­rect in­ter­ac­tion with the sys­tems them­selves, just the un­der­ly­ing in­fra­struc­ture,” he not­ed.

Weir said the agency swift­ly en­gaged its re­sponse mech­a­nism, went in­to con­tain­ment and dis­abled cer­tain ser­vices to mit­i­gate fall­out from the ex­ter­nal at­tacks.

He fur­ther ex­plained that sim­i­lar at­tacks have been con­cen­trat­ed across com­pa­nies that han­dle per­son­al da­ta as well as health ser­vices glob­al­ly.

But he said for se­cu­ri­ty pur­pos­es, the name of the cy­ber crim­i­nal group will not be made pub­lic giv­en the po­ten­tial im­pli­ca­tions.

“We won’t put that out there for any­body to be able to fol­low these guys. I can say at this point, we’ve iden­ti­fied one of the groups that has been ac­tive in Ja­maica over the last year or so,” he re­vealed.

“So, I’ve had dis­plea­sure of com­ing up on this par­tic­u­lar group in oth­er com­pa­nies lo­cal­ly, not just Ja­maica alone, but tar­get­ing cer­tain types of en­ti­ties glob­al­ly,” Weir ex­plained, adding that these en­ti­ties usu­al­ly have health-re­lat­ed da­ta.

The ORG is Ja­maica’s sole repos­i­to­ry of birth, death, mar­riage and foetal death records.

While most of the crit­i­cal ser­vices have been re­stored, the agency is cau­tious­ly and strate­gi­cal­ly phas­ing in its re­main­ing op­er­a­tions that were tak­en of­fline.

Mean­while, the Na­tion­al Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and Reg­is­tra­tion Au­thor­i­ty, un­der which the ORG falls, says its cy­ber se­cu­ri­ty sys­tems re­main ro­bust and se­cure.

It as­sured Ja­maican cit­i­zens and stake­hold­ers that their da­ta is se­cure and that the in­tegri­ty of the Na­tion­al Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion Sys­tem re­mains un­com­pro­mised. —KINGSTON, Ja­maica (CMC)