MSME Business In Indonesia Often Becomes The Target Of Phishing Crime, Here's How To Prevent It

Screenshot of UMKM Online Discussion with Gojek (Tachta Citra Elvira / VOI)

JAKARTA - Business actors in micro, small and medium enterprises (UMKM) are known to often become victims of social engineering-based digital crimes such as phishing. The reason is because there are still many people who do not understand when starting a business through the internet media.

According to data from security firm Kaspersky, there were 192,591 phishing attacks against MSMEs in Indonesia in the first quarter of 2020. The cyber criminals sent e-mails regarding COVID-19 information and took advantage of potential curiosity and panic.

Please note, phishing is a fraudulent method by tricking the target into taking advantage of the victim. Phishing can be said to steal important information by taking over the victim's account for a specific purpose.

Phishing usually often uses e-mail or SMS media, where the distribution via e-mail is done to provide information that leads to fake pages for the purpose of trapping victims.

"This type of psychological manipulation does not take advantage of system vulnerabilities, but instead takes advantage of the weaknesses and weaknesses of technology users' digital competences. With the increasing number of business actors migrating online, these psychic manipulators are targeting them," said the Center for Digital Society (CfDS) researcher. ) Gadjah Mada University, Ir. Tony Seno Hartono in the online discussion #AmanBersamaGojek, Friday 18 September.

So, according to Tony, it is very important to carry out continuous and consistent education, so that individuals and business people using technology can understand and avoid this type of fraud.

Tony stated that anyone can educate others, and it is not only the duty of the community as users, but also other parties including digital service providers, even the government.

"This is our common task. Service providers such as Gojek and academics such as CfDS are conducting education with the reach of many people and the media, to continue to increase digital insight. The government is of course also involved. For example, with the Personal Data Protection Bill, to educational institutions such as schools. , "said Tony.

For that, Tony also provided several ways to avoid this cyber crime. Given that the number of victims produced is quite high, proper education is needed in prevention.

"The first thing that can be done to prevent phishing is that users must use a clean device and always update their application, can also use security applications such as anti-malware as well as anti-phishing," said Tony.

Do not stop there, users can also save data to cloud computing (cloud), or use cloud-based e-mail that is equipped with anti-phishing.

"So, phishing can be blocked first before entering e-mail. With this cloud storage system, phishing possibilities will be more difficult to penetrate potential victims," explained Tony.