In the mid-2000s, a malware family originating from Indonesia called Brontok became the twentieth most common malware worldwide, according to the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report.
I was still in junior high school, and computers at my school were among those infected.
While searching for a solution, I found help from an Indonesian online cybersecurity community. I remained active in that forum much longer than intended and have since joined various other communities.
While most hacker communities at the time were full of questionable practices, I was fortunate enough to join a focused community of Indonesian ethical hackers with in-depth discussions, learning about interesting topics such as web security, reverse engineering, and binary exploitation while learning to apply the knowledge for good.
It was fascinating to see how people in my country could demonstrate such aptitude in something as complex as cybersecurity.
Yet, in the 2022 OECD PISA benchmark, Indonesia ranked in the bottom 15% to 20% for overall education outcomes among the 81 participating countries and economies. We are rarely recognized within the global STEM community and are often not seen as capable as neighboring countries such as Singapore and Vietnam.
Despite this, Indonesia has produced strong results in international academic and skills competitions.
By 2026, representatives from Indonesia were frequent achievers in STEM olympiads and skills competitions across mathematics, the hard sciences, and information technology, including Capture the Flag (CTF).
CTF is popular among Indonesian students and cybersecurity communities. SKSD, the team my Indonesian community peers and I started, ranked #9 globally on CTFtime in 2023 among more than 40,000 teams. The team later became less active as national boundaries became less relevant and many players joined top international teams, including the team that won DEF CON CTF 2026.
Indonesia also has notable bug bounty hunters who rank highly in prestigious programs, researchers credited with notable CVEs, and developers behind popular open-source security projects.
As a developing country with 280 million people, Indonesia's scale increases the likelihood of finding highly curious people who are willing to learn, some of whom can become notable within such a large population.
Promoting cybersecurity research and engineering
Skill competitions are good indicators, but knowledge ultimately needs to be applied through research and engineering.
Research is a major part of cybersecurity. Practitioners around the world research new vulnerabilities in widely used software, novel methodologies, notable threats, and practical engineering approaches that improve how we test systems and build security defenses.
Some Indonesian researchers have already published and presented notable work, but I believe we can push further.
IDNSEC's vision is to become a cybersecurity research and engineering hub for Indonesia. This is particularly important as advances in AI radically change offensive and defensive security work.
Although founded as an independent, non-business entity, IDNSEC's long-term mission is to advance the country's cyber defense, expertise, and capabilities. In the future, when opportunities arise, government agencies, institutions, and organizations in Indonesia can collaborate with our members or contributors to solve cybersecurity problems.
Our initial work will focus on the following:
- Collaborating with Indonesian cybersecurity practitioners to share and publish the results of their work and research in English and Indonesian.
- Curating articles to avoid AI slop and generic material that adds little value.
- Engaging students and professionals to promote interest in cybersecurity research and engineering.
- Creating a focus group for joint research and notable knowledge sharing.
- Opening communication channels for organizations in Indonesia to discuss how to accelerate and strengthen cybersecurity research and engineering, particularly through AI.
Call for contributors
If you are an Indonesian cybersecurity practitioner interested in contributing or learning more about this initiative, you can contact us at hi@idnsec.com.
We are particularly looking for writing that adds new context and value, or offers specific insights from your observations and experience. If you are using AI for research or writing, ensure you validate the output and avoid AI slop in the substance, text, or image that you produce.
If preferred, you may choose to show or hide your identity in the publication.
We look forward to seeing your impressive work! Hopefully, we can do interesting things and give back to communities in Indonesia and globally.