The state of emergency in cyberspace

LAST month, the Indonesian government suffered a massive ransomware attack in which the databases of 282 agencies were hijacked by still as-yet unidentified hackers, who demanded an $8 million ransom to release them and threatened to expose sensitive data if the government refused. The incident was the biggest cyberattack in Southeast Asia in recent history but was by no means a rare occurrence; as we on the editorial board were discussing this topic Tuesday morning, we received an advisory, as if on cue, that the Department of Migrant Workers (DMW) suffered a similar ransomware attack on Monday night. Cyberattacks of all kinds have reached crisis proportions across most of Asean countries, and it is high time that the Asean member-states individually and collectively regard the threat as the state of emergency it has become.