The hackers replaced the House logo as the channel’s profile picture with an image of a golden slot machine, with text written “Slot Baris”. They also posted multiple live-streamed videos showing online gambling apps with narration in Turkish in the background.

Thousands of netizens tuned in to watch the live streams, with some commenting that they found the incident “hilarious”.

House secretary-general Indra Iskandar confirmed the hacking, saying officials had reached out to Indonesian representatives of Google to recover access to the YouTube account, which had 280,000 subscribers at the time of the hacking.

“The Google team has contacted its headquarters to recover the account. In the meantime, our internal IT team is also trying to recover the account manually through the Google system,” Indra said in a statement on Wednesday.

The online gambling live streams had been removed when The Jakarta Post accessed the YouTube channel at around 11 a.m. on Wednesday. However, the account was inaccessible when the Post retried accessing it later in the day.

The hacking incident occurred amid the rise of cyberattacks by online gambling rings on government-owned websites and social media handles.

At least 683 cyberattacks related to online gambling occurred against websites of government or educational institutions between January 2022 and February this year, according to the Communications and Information Ministry.

Hackers often do web defacement on the hacked website, changing a website’s visual appearance or content with ads for online gaming apps.

Officials at the communications ministry said the lack of understanding within governmental agencies on cybersecurity led to an increase in cyberattacks. These institutions also left their defunct website domains rather than deleting them, making them prone to be misused by hackers.

Pratama Persadha, founder and chair of cybersecurity watchdog the Communication and Information System Security Research Center (CISSReC), echoed the ministry on the government’s lack of awareness on cybersecurity.

He claimed he had warned operators of government websites and social media accounts of the hacking threat from companies behind online gambling platforms.

“They don’t understand that there are many big online gambling companies paying hackers to promote their websites and apps,” he said in a statement on Wednesday.

Among measures to prevent such cyberattacks are routinely changing passwords, not opening or clicking on suspicious links and using multifactor authentication, an extra layer of security in which users need to have an extra code sent to another device at the time of login.

The communications and information minister is working with the National Cyber and Encryption Agency (BSSN) to check the security of all government-owned websites to prevent similar incidents from occurring.

Indonesia is waging war against online gambling, which is illegal according to the law.

Any individual caught organizing and participating in gambling activities can face up to 10 years in prison and a Rp 25 million (US$1,663) fine, as mandated by Article 303 of the Criminal Code (KUHP).

The Electronic Information and Transactions (ITE) Law also stipulates punishment for people found guilty of distributing online gambling content on the internet: six years of imprisonment and a Rp 1 billion fine.

The National Police have carried out numerous crackdowns and have arrested several people allegedly involved in the online gambling business.

The newly appointed Communications and Information Minister Budi Arie Setiadi also promised to ramp up efforts to eradicate online gambling in the country. The communications ministry has blocked more than 840,000 online gambling sites since 2018, the minister claimed recently.