Indonesia's cyber problem isn't skill, it's who's in charge

When ransomware called "Brain Cipher" hit Indonesia's temporary national data centre in June 2024, it froze services at 282 government agencies for weeks, including immigration counters and airports. Ransomware is harmful software that locks up an organisation's data and demands payment to unlock it. Writing for the Lowy Institute, the author argues the slow recovery showed a problem that money and training cannot fix: nobody had the power to take charge.

Indonesia does have a national cyber agency, BSSN, but it can only coordinate; it cannot order other agencies to act. During the attack it could not force ministries to follow basic backup rules, and many had not. The military, known as the TNI, had no formal role in a cyber crisis and no way to work with the civilian teams, so decisions stalled. A 2025 law finally gave the TNI a cyber mandate, but the author says this adds a job title, not a clear chain of command. Part of the reason is history: after Suharto fell in 1998, the reforms known as reformasi deliberately kept the military out of civilian affairs, which now leaves a gap when a crisis crosses those lines.

The problem reaches beyond Indonesia. Partners like Australia have signed cyber cooperation deals that assume Jakarta can coordinate a fast response, and that may be wrong. The author's fix is a National Cyber Crisis Centre, where BSSN holds civilian authority and the military, police, and ministries act under it once an incident is declared. The real limit, the piece says, "is not capability but authority".

Why it matters

If government systems freeze again, ordinary citizens are the ones stuck at airports, immigration desks, and public offices, sometimes for weeks. The article's point is that the fix is less about better technology or more training and more about deciding in advance who takes command when a crisis crosses agencies. Until that is settled, Indonesia stays open to the same slow, tangled response that made the 2024 attack so damaging.