Indonesia hunts down Bjorka as analysts warn hacking spree could be ‘tip of the iceberg’
- Bjorka claims to be behind the hacking of spy documents, voter information and the data of 1.3 billion registered mobile phone users
- Indonesia is setting up a task force to address the data leaks, but critics say a lack of coordination means various agencies are passing the buck on investigating the issue
Amid public alarm over the data leaks, a senior official on Wednesday sought to reassure Indonesians that all state secrets remained safe.
“Until now, no state secret has been leaked. We will take it seriously and deal with this problem, but also the public must remain calm,” said coordinating minister for legal, political, and security affairs Mahfud MD. “[These data breaches] remind us to build sophisticated [cybersecurity] systems.”
Mahfud said the public could expect the House of Representatives to pass the long-awaited Personal Data Protection bill into law “within a month’s time”. The bill was introduced to parliament eight years ago.
Wahyudi Djafar, executive director with the Institute for Policy Research and Advocacy (Elsam), said the data breaches would be “the tip of the iceberg” if the country continued to lack a comprehensive legal framework on personal data protection.
“Everything these days is data-driven, all government and private parties today are competing to collect data on a large scale, but the protection scheme was not prepared from scratch,” he said.
