Strengthening Digital Security in the Cloud & AI Era, BDO in Indonesia Stresses Importance of Cyber Resilience

The rapid development of cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) technology brings significant opportunities as well as massive cyber risks for the business world. A cyberattack that devastated the financial sector earlier this year served as a stark warning for corporate executives to safeguard brand value and operational stability. In February 2026, a regional bank in Indonesia suffered substantial losses from a mass auto-debit attack by hackers, who drained Rp 143 billion from more than 6,000 customer accounts. To mitigate the damage, the bank was forced to freeze its customers’ mobile banking and ATM access for months. Responding to this increasingly alarming phenomenon of cyber threats, Reza Aminy, Associate Director of IT & Digital at BDO in Indonesia, stated that investigations indicate the incident could have stemmed from several factors. These include critical security failures, such as an IT system that had not been updated since 2012, weak governance lacking a 24-hour Security Operation Centre (SOC), and poorly managed vendor risks. Ultimately, the Rp 143 billion loss had to be covered using the company’s previous year’s profits, underscoring the harsh reality that recovery costs far outweigh prevention costs. Reza assessed that the current cyber threat landscape is shifting rapidly, with the gap between vulnerability disclosure and active mass exploitation shrinking from weeks to just days. In cloud environments, identity compromise now forms the basis of 83 per cent of major intrusions. Attackers exploit voice-based social engineering (vishing), steal authentication tokens, and misuse CI/CD pipelines to gain full administrative access within hours. The primary target remains high-volume data theft, whether carried out by external threat actors or malicious insiders using private cloud storage platforms to exfiltrate data. On the other hand, while AI boosts productivity, the technology acts as a double-edged sword by introducing complex privacy risks and facilitating cyber criminals.