Nicholas Robertson

Article Review #1
The article I’m reviewing comes from the International Journal of Cyber Criminology and is titled Encryption as the Legal Protection Against Cybercrimes Associated with Digital Land Certificates in Indonesia, Witten by Muhammad Yusni and Bisdan Sigalingging and issued in the year 2021.

To start off, this article focuses on Indonesia and their focus on moving physical documents of land ownership into digital versions of said documents. They are committing to this change as it reduces the cost of storing documents and is a more time efficient and safer way of assessing information. But there are problems with this, and it involves hackers who have the capability to hack and steal and ownership information from Indonesians and this article points out ways to stop/mitigate this through encryption and hashing. Reading though this article I think believe that the authors did a great job in thoroughly explaining the benefits of encryption and explaining how encryption works. There are whole paragraphs just dedicated to explaining encryptions and I think that’s an excellent way to get you point across and explain the importance of encryption to someone wo might have never even heard of the term before reading the article. An issue I have with this article is the lack of data they provide with the amount of people that might have already been affected by attacks on their information. Throughout the journal they talk about the benefits of encryption and this could be just a precautionary journal that is explaining to the reader the benefits of encryption and why it should be implemented before anyone has been attacked, but I think using statics of this occurring in their country or even another county, no matter how big or small, could have put into prospective of the situation a little better and would have shown how this issue was persisting though out the country. Another issues that cropped up was the fact that there was no attempt by the author to come up with a research question or hypothesis to the issue at hand. But instead deem encryption as the be all or end all when it comes to keeping your information safe and unreadable. While this is true on their behalf, it’s something that should be pointed out as it could have helped them with persuade the reader more, by looking into the question of whether or not this is a good option to go to because there might be better alternatives, we haven’t considered instead of this is the only way to combat the issue. While this journal tended to lean more on the technical side of stealing information with hacking, it mentions social engineered attacks like phishing emails to steal important information from people to gain access to their lives. They advised that companies should start training their employees as soon as they can to avoid attacks like this at their place of work. Overall I think this journal is decent for what it is, that being an informative journal that tries and explain the benefits of encryption and how it can protect and help protect the landownership of millions of Indonesians, who are at risk of having they documents tampered and/or stolen. I feel as though most of the information within the journal was thoroughly explained like encryption, but other aspects like statistics of people who might have already been compromised were surly overlooked and omitted from the journal. Having a leading question to focus the article would have been welcomed, but for this reading it was not mandatory for it to be there.

Sources: https://cybercrimejournal.com/menuscript/index.php/cybercrimejournal/article/view/34/11