The Department of Justice and Constitutional Development has made strides in recovering from the ransomware attack that occurred in September 2021.
Over the past few weeks, the team of Departmental officials, industry specialists and advisors from organs of State have successfully contained the spread of the malware. A number of online services have been reactivated in a safe and secure manner. The team has also focused on ensuring that the payment of child maintenance money to beneficiaries is disrupted as little as possible.
Another critical area that has been given high priority is the electronic recording of court proceedings to ensure that courts are able to operate as normal. Most of the recordings are intact, and able to sync back to the central repository. Where courts are still experiencing challenges, a special capacity has been deployed to attend to queries on a case-by-case basis. The web portal that is used by transcribers to
download court recordings for transcription purposes was successfully restored.
Furthermore, considerable progress has been made in restoring the Integrated Case Management System (ICMS), which is an administrative system used at all courts, particularly the Office of the Master of the High Court. Parts of the system are already accessible, such as curatorship, and the online portals used for historic searches. More work will be done in the next few days to complete the process of
bringing back online functionality in respect of Trusts, Deceased Estates and Insolvencies (amongst others).
Following finalisation of a high level assessment in respect of the possible leak of personal information, and in line with the provisions of the Protection of Personal Information Act, the Department issued a notice on its website to its data subjects. The Department has strengthened security measures to protect sensitive personal information under its custodianship. Measures include upgrading our ICT security
infrastructure and ensuring more stringent access control electronic and physical. The Department would like to thank members of the public for their patience and understanding during this crisis period.
For media enquiries:
Mr. Steve Mahlangu
Department of Justice and Constitutional Development
Cell: 079 878 7587
Email: Stmahlangu@Justice.gov.za
