Malawi halts passport printing after immigration system hack and ransom demand

Malawi stopped issuing passports in early 2024 after what President Lazarus Chakwera described to parliament as a hack of the immigration department's systems. Addressing legislators in Lilongwe, Chakwera said attackers he called "digital mercenaries" had taken control of the passport printing system roughly three weeks earlier and had demanded a ransom.

The president said the government would not pay, telling parliament it was not in the business of appeasing criminals with public money, and he did not disclose the amount demanded. He characterized the intrusion as a serious national security breach and said investigations were under way to establish who was responsible. No attribution was published.

The outage compounded an existing backlog at immigration offices, where queues had grown as Malawians sought travel documents, including many looking for farm work in Israel. Chakwera gave immigration officials a three week deadline to find a temporary workaround so passport printing could resume, alongside longer term work to strengthen the department's security.

The official account was not universally accepted. The regional technology outlet Techzim relayed claims that the system had been disabled amid a dispute with Techno Brain, the Kenyan firm that built it, rather than by an outside attacker, and reported that the government had allegedly tried to work around the vendor's licensing. The government did not publish technical evidence of an intrusion.