Data Check: Gibran Hints at Data Theft, Indonesia Ranked 13th Highest for Data Breaches

Presidential candidate number one, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, highlighted the importance of strengthening Indonesia's cybersecurity to address data breaches.

He made this statement during the second 2024 Presidential and Vice-Presidential Debate, themed "People's Economy, Digital Economy, Finance, Investment, Taxation, State Budget/Regional Budget Management, Infrastructure, and Urbanization," held at the Jakarta Convention Center on Friday, December 22, 2023.

Gibran stated, "We must be cautious about data theft; we must strengthen our cybersecurity and cyber defense."

Citing data from Surfshark, Indonesia is the 13th highest country in the world for data breaches. This can be seen from the email address data breaches that have occurred since 2004, involving 143.7 million accounts in Indonesia. This number has also increased by 85% in the last two quarters.

Historically, Surfshark has observed three of the largest data breach incidents: Tokopedia in April 2020 with 15 million accounts breached, followed by Wattpad in June 2020 with 22.9 million accounts breached. Then, in August 2022, 12.6 million Indihome accounts experienced a data breach.

From 2004 to the third quarter of 2023, the United States was the country with the highest number of data breaches, reaching 2.7 billion accounts, or 16.7% of global account breaches. This was followed by Russia with 2.3 billion accounts breached, or 14.1% of global data breach incidents.