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oordinating Political, Legal and Security Affairs Minister Tedjo Edhy Purdijatno said on Tuesday that a national cyber security agency could start operating early next year.

'€œHopefully we will be able to put aside funds for the agency in next year'€™s state budget,'€ he told reporters on the sidelines of a national cyber security agency symposium in Central Jakarta.

Tedjo said that the agency would play important roles in dealing with cyber attacks that had been intensifying in the past decade.

Currently, Tedjo said, each of the country'€™s defense and law enforcement institutions had their own cyber crime unit but they lacked coordination and were slow to pick up on new technologies.

'€œOne of the incidents that have convinced us of the urgency of such an agency is the Australia-Indonesia spying scandal [in 2013]. The President [Joko '€œJokowi'€ Widodo] has been asking about the plan for this agency but we want to make sure that this agency is well-prepared,'€ he said.

Tedjo said that the planned agency would bring in officials from the National Police, the military (TNI), the National Intelligence Agency (BIN) and the Communications and Information Ministry among others.

Data from the Communications and Information Ministry show that Indonesia was the world'€™s largest source of cybercrime attacks during the second quarter of 2013, during which 42,000 targets were identified each day. The data also show that 36.6 million cyber attacks had occurred in Indonesia in the past three years.

Most attacks were in the form of viruses and malware that were difficult to detect by existing network devices.