OJK tells banks to halt suspicious transactions as joint OJK–BI cyber incident team activates

The Financial Services Authority (OJK) has instructed banks to temporarily suspend transactions showing anomalous indications pending clarification, increase monitoring of high-value transactions, and conduct penetration testing, cyberattack simulations and IT audits, banking supervision chief Dian Ediana Rae said Monday. The authority and Bank Indonesia have activated a joint Cyber Incident Response Team (TTIS), and the issue escalated to cabinet level the same day, with the coordinating minister for political and security affairs bringing BSSN and banking leaders together and the economics minister urging banks to strengthen cyber defenses.

The threat backdrop is vendor-reported: FortiGuard Labs recorded about 1.9 million blocked attack attempts in the 24 hours to Monday afternoon, roughly 999,000 of them aimed at banking, finance and insurance — figures experts caution count blocked attempts, not successful breaches. The instruction turns cyber resilience from guidance into a checkable operational procedure: banks must be able to show how anomalous transactions are flagged, halted, clarified by humans, and documented. Vendors serving the sector now face harder procurement due diligence, and the sequence — automated detection, human clarification, audit trail — is becoming a regulator-endorsed workflow pattern. OJK's guidance currently takes the form of supervisory letters rather than a new formal regulation.