Website of Brazilian health ministry hit by hacker attack, systems down

Brazil's health ministry website was hit on Friday by a hacker attack that took several systems down, including one with information about the national immunization program and a second one used to issue digital vaccination certificates, the ministry said.

"The Health Ministry reports that in the early hours of Friday it suffered an incident that temporarily compromised some of its systems ... which are currently unavailable," it said in a statement.

The Institutional Security Office and the federal police were called in after the attack. According to the police, an investigation into the matter has been opened.

The alleged hackers posted a message on the website saying that internal data had been copied and deleted. "Contact us if you want the data back," it said, including e-mail and Telegram contact info.

The message had been removed by Friday morning, but the web page was still down, while user data in the ConectSUS app had disappeared.

The ministry said it was working to restore its systems.