TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - AwanPintar released its report on cyber threats in Indonesia in the first semester of 2023. The data showed a downward trend in cyber attacks with the exception of May, which showed a higher number of cyber attacks compared to other months.

Yudhi Kukuh, the Founder of AwanPintar.id and the CFO of PT Prosperita Sistem Indonesia, said that the "Report of Cyber Threat in the First Semester of 2023" is beneficial since it specifically discussed the attacks in Indonesia.

"It shows the importance of a cyber security monitoring system as a reference for Indonesia's information and technology professionals," he said in a brief message, on Thursday, July 20, 2023. He said that the pattern of attack and target to the port was the feeding data for prediction and security in all of the governmental networks.

As technology rapidly develops, cyber-attacks such as ransomware, phishing, and crypto-jacking is becoming more common and hard to detect. The easiest medium to send a cyber-attack is through email.

The most common form of cyber-attacks is spam and malware. Spam is a junk email used to send mass broadcasts and is often misused to spread malware by sneaking them among the attachments, endangering the victim's device.

The percentage of spam and malware detected by AwanPintar.id sent to Indonesian emails are January (5.78%), February (2.67%), March (13.45%), April (14.05%), May (29.14%), and June(20.94%).

Generally, the malware attack at the beginning of the year was fluctuating but slowly showed an upward trend. The percentage jolted multiple times and reached its peak in May. It was the worst month in the first semester of 2023 since LockBit, a ransomware, was gaining popularity. In May 2023, Lockbit attacked Syariah Bank in Indonesia. At the end of the first semester, the percentage of spam and malware in Indonesia decreased by 9%.

Another cyber-crimes that is being highlighted is Business Email Compromise, another attack commonly unleashed through email. Sometimes the attack will involve malware, and other times depend on psychological manipulation techniques where antivirus, spam filter, and whitelisting became useless.

Malware

The five biggest foreign contributors to malware attacks on Indonesia are the Netherlands (25.66%), the US (16.84%), Hungary (15.61), Ukraine (15.27%), and Lithuania (11.73).

The most common commodity of attacks through email is malware, such as ransomware, adware, and spyware. The most dangerous ones are ransomware and spyware.

Overall, the US and the Netherlands are included in the top 10 biggest cyber-attack contributors in Indonesia. However, the other countries; Hungary, Ukraine, and Lithuania did not have any significant track record of cyber-attack in Indonesia, yet they entered the top five countries in their contribution of malware attacks on Indonesia in the first semester of 2023.

Spam

The five countries responsible for the biggest spam attacks on Indonesia are China (31.26%), North Macedonia (20.47%), India (18.15%), Germany (18.08%), and Indonesia (6.29%).

Spam emails are a cyber pandemic, a highly cost-efficient yet effective type of attack. The most common attack contained in spam emails is phishing, a cyber crime targeting the victim's information and sensitive data through email, social media posts, or text messages.

The perpetrator usually disguises themselves as a legitimate institution or agency. They would attach a link to their official-sounding broadcast, leading the victims to click the fraudulent link. The target data for phishing are personal data (name, age, address), account data (username and password), and financial data (credit card information or bank account).

AwanPintar.id highlighted the fact that Indonesia placed fifth as the biggest contributor of spam attacks in Indonesia. Domestic attacks like this could be a result of hijacked accounts or servers from outside of Indonesia.

MARIA FRANSISCA LAHUR

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