Hi. It’s Brady again.
Khamila, my colleague in Jakarta, has been following the sad state of cybersecurity in Indonesia for months. The latest news coming out of this beat is yet another leak, this time of 2 million BRI Life customers’ personal data. Aside from a lot of paperwork, the leak included national IDs, taxpayer identification numbers, photos of customers’ bankbooks, birth certificates, and medical records. It sold for USD 7,000.
This keeps happening over and over again. The latest leak, although sizable, pales in comparison to another case that involved the information of 279 million Indonesians (alive and deceased) likely plundered from the country’s healthcare and social security agency. Indonesia’s major enterprises and government agencies are frequent targets of hackers, but investigations of the breaches often move slowly and generally seem to lack resolutions. And, the entities that store people’s data also seem to be doing little to improve the secureness of this information.
I recall headlines from two, three years ago that said data is the most valuable resource and it is worth more than oil. Whether that’s true is up for debate, but hackers recognize data that describes you as an unsecured resource, and are perfectly happy to make copies of it for their personal gain.
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