Jakarta: The recent cyberattack in Indonesia that massively disrupted its national data system has urged the country to strengthen its cyber resilience and evaluate its digital technology policy.
Indonesian Coordinating Minister for Political, Legal and Security Affairs Hadi Tjahjanto said on Friday that the government would carry out digital security improvement and strengthen the system capabilities of its national data centre, reported Xinhua news agency.
“We are making the data centre with the ability to have multiple back-ups, layered back-ups with good security. We want it to be a system that cannot be hacked. This will continue to be done to support the government’s performance in serving the public,” Tjahjanto said in a press conference.
Indonesia’s Ministry of Communication and Informatics is currently preparing to execute what it calls as “tenant redeploy”, improving the digital security in governance by stricter standard operating procedures. “We’ll execute it from August to September 2024,” the ministry’s Director General of Informatics Applications, Ismail, said on Thursday.
The ransomware attack that targeted Indonesia’s national data centre and created a massive data crisis started on June 17 and went on for almost one week, with the hacker initially asking for a ransom of $8 million.
According to the Ministry of Communication and Informatics and the National Cyber and Encryption Agency, at least 282 institutions were disrupted by the attack, including the immigration services, which caused long queues at the airports due to system bottlenecks at the immigration checkpoints.