Next year on February 14, 2024, Indonesia will hold the next general election. At this time of the year, misinformation and cyberthreats are on their peak haunting those who are not careful enough. In order to combat this problem, social engineering might play an important role in securing and creating a positive election environment for Indonesians next year.
A report in 2023 by Acronis stated that email-based threats have surged by 464% in 2023 when compared to the first half of last year. Social engineering threats should not be taken lightly, especially for the upcoming 2024 General Election. Hoaxes are easy to spread during an election, especially seeing the political climate in Indonesia lately.
Fadil Imran from Kapolda Metro Jaya also voiced his concern regarding the rise of cyber threats during the election, he wished that cyber education would be pushed harder to prevent any malicious activities from taking place.
Social engineering is important to combat cyber security problems, it can even be seen as the structure to eliminate the knowledge gap between experts and the casual population. Quoted from Anastasios Arampatzis, wrote that the objective of social engineering is to build a cyber security awareness with coherent behavior, notion, cognition, and others that can help to prevent any data loss or cyber attack.
So, what should Indonesians do?
Social engineering is a great way to start as an educational media to prevent cyber threats during the election. Not many Indonesians are aware of many cyber issues, and this could be a huge obstacle to prevent the catastrophe that is waiting for February 2024. To prevent cyber attacks from happening, the population needs to know the cyber attacks themselves.
The dots of social engineering attacks can be connected to phishing or malware attacks. They do not always have a red line connecting them, but once they are connected they can be bigger problems.
When hackers steal someone’s private data, such as credit card numbers, phone numbers, addresses, and so on, that data can help the hackers to boost their social engineering attacks. By providing the data that the hackers own, the hackers can convince their victims to give out more of their data, and then social engineering attacks would be successful.
What’s for the election?
The simplest answer is education. Educate the population, but do not go too advanced or deep with the education on cyber security awareness because it will be confusing for casual people to understand. Just go with a simple awareness. Here are three things that we note as important things to do:
- Training
Train and educate the population, and in this case Indonesians. Spread the awareness about social engineering attacks, including hoaxes and other threats. Educate them to not give out any information to people that they do not trust, or coming from suspicious sources.
- Response
After training the population, the government or private sector should be preparing a good response for an attack. The population should feel protected and know that there are organizations that have resources to help them.
- Intelligence
After all the attacks that happened and the awareness that was spread, organizations should gather all the data and create a list of all the attacks that take place, including their prevention method. This is important so that when an attack happens, prevention can be done thanks to the list that has been created.
That’s it?
No, social engineering is more than that. Education done by an individual at home may be enough when it comes to individual cases, but when it comes to organizations/offices, it is wiser to conduct social engineering together with a cyber security consultant. Not only because what is at stake for organizations is much bigger than for an individual, but organizations hold many responsibilities for their employees.
What’s for an individual?
For individuals who still feel lost, here are tips that might help:
- Do not give any crucial information to untrusted sources (NIK, credit card numbers, address, and so on)
- Do not click on any link given by untrusted sources
- Always double-check messages from anyone who is not from your contact list
- If you still feel unsure about your action, please consult someone who understands more.
Read our other works:
• Indonesia Upcoming 2024 Election Cyber Problems
• What is Printer Hacking? Get to Know Printer Hacking and How to Protect Your Company
• BSSN 2023 Cyber Attack Trend Explained
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