Multiple countries in the Caribbean are recovering from cyberattacks affecting crucial government services.
The countries are part of what is known colloquially as the Dutch Caribbean, which includes Curaçao, Aruba and Sint Maarten. The islands have nearly half a million residents and are part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
The incidents began two weeks ago when the Curaçao Tax Office said it was dealing with a ransomware attack. The country’s Finance Ministry said the incident affected the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration on July 24 — predicting days of service outages.
Some departments were restored last week, including the Motor Vehicle Tax Department and other services. Phone service was down for days as well.
The office said on Monday that it has since resolved the incident and is back to normal but spent weeks without customer support channels and several internal processes.
Finance Minister Javier Silvania confirmed to local news outlet Curaçao Chronicle that experts from the Netherlands were brought in to help with the recovery effort.
That attack was followed by an announcement from the Joint Court of Justice — which runs the court system for the three islands as well as the smaller jurisdictions of Bonaire, Saba and Sint Eustatius — that it was also dealing with a cyberattack. Starting on July 23, the court reported severe technical issues affecting its computer systems.
The court was shut down for multiple days, with officials saying they were unable to resolve the technical issues. On Friday, the court said that between July 23 and July 28, “the Joint Court of Justice may not have received all emails” and urged people to resend any emails sent during that time.
Aruba and beyond
The Parliament of Aruba faced its own cybersecurity issues last week, notifying the public that one of its official email accounts was hacked.
“If you have received any suspicious or unexpected messages appearing to be from us, please do not open any links or attachments,” the country’s parliament said in an official notice. “We are actively investigating the incident and taking steps to restore full security across our systems.”
In subsequent warnings, the parliament said that it recently “received a notification of a phishing email that is currently going around.”
“This email is designed to steal sensitive information and could have serious consequences,” they said.
Several experts noted that all of the incidents across the Dutch Caribbean were preceded by a notice in the Netherlands of a potential breach of the Public Prosecution Service — which is an analog of the U.S. Justice Department.
On July 22, the department said it would be disconnected from the internet for several weeks due to “an alert received by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) regarding a potential vulnerability in Citrix NetScaler” — which is used to provide employees with access to the office environment.
The office has not provided an update since then but local news outlets reported significant issues with legal proceedings as a result of the cyberattack.
The number of ransomware attacks on governments in the Caribbean have increased significantly over the last two years.
The Bahamas was hit in February just weeks after Turks and Caicos was attacked by ransomware actors. A ransomware gang targeted Bermuda’s government and another unnamed Caribbean island in 2023.
Martinique, Trinidad and Tobago, the Dominican Republic and Guadeloupe have all dealt with ransomware attacks in the last year while Costa Rica — a Central American country along the Caribbean Sea — faced a wide-ranging incident affecting several parts of its government.
The recent attacks prompted Sint Maarten’s Bureau Telecommunications and Post to release a warning to businesses last week about “the growing threat of ransomware attacks across the Caribbean region” — citing the attack on the Curaçao Tax Office as an example.
“Ransomware continues to be one of the most pressing and disruptive cybersecurity threats facing our region,” said Judianne Labega-Hoeve, interim director of the Bureau Telecommunications and Post.
“Given the increasing sophistication of these attacks and the significant operational and financial risks involved, it is imperative that businesses in Sint Maarten adopt a proactive and strategic approach to cybersecurity. Strengthening cyber defenses is no longer optional — it is essential to ensure business continuity and safeguard critical data and systems.”
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