[Jakarta Special Correspondence] Indonesia's established investigative media, Tempo, conducted an in-depth investigation into the Cambodian online gambling group, unexpectedly triggering a cross-Southeast Asia public opinion war and technological confrontation. Dubbed "the cost of truth in the digital age" by media observers, the event not only brought the issue of press freedom back into focus but also exposed the dark chain of transnational cybercrime and power collusion.
In-depth investigation triggers a "digital earthquake"
On the 7th of this month, Tempo released "Cambodian Gambling Web: The Invisible Tentacles Devouring Indonesia" (Indonesian Entrepreneurs in Cambodia's Casinos), an investigative report based on over 2,300 documents and testimonies from 57 informants, revealing the network of interest delivery between the West Port online gambling group in Cambodia and Indonesia's political and business elites. The report directly pointed out that a family business of a certain national legislator is suspected of assisting in laundering over 120 million US dollars, along with encrypted communication records with Cambodian high-level officials.
Within three hours of the article's release, the report's shares on Indonesian social media exceeded 500,000, and the related topic #JaringanJudiKamboja (Cambodian Gambling Network) quickly topped Twitter's trending list.
Precisely planned "digital physical attacks"
According to Tempo's technical team, starting at 14:25 on the 7th, the website faced three waves of exponentially growing DDoS attacks. The first wave reached a traffic of 450GB per second, the second wave pushed the traffic to 1.2Tbps using an IoT botnet, and the last wave adopted application layer attack techniques, forging legitimate user requests causing server response delays to soar by 800%. Notably, 76.4% of the attack IPs originated from Phnom Penh and West Port in Cambodia, and 19.3% from Jakarta, Indonesia, forming a rare "cross-border digital siege."
Declaration of survival under the news iron curtain
Facing continuous attacks for 72 hours, Tempo's chief editor Setri Yasra made a strong statement in an emergency editorial meeting: "We will not become cicadas of the digital age. When our reporting touches the core interests of some, these attacks affirm our direction."
The newspaper's technical team temporarily activated a distributed content delivery network (CDN) and joined forces with the international cybersecurity organization CrowdSec to build a defense alliance, gradually restoring service by the early morning of the 9th.
The "Black Spring" phenomenon in the news world
This attack triggered a rare collective action in the Indonesian media world. The Jakarta branch of the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) joined 23 media organizations in issuing a joint statement, warning that "using digital weapons to strangle oversight is creating a new information iron curtain." The Media Legal Aid Institute (LBH Pers) submitted an 87-page evidence chain to the National Cybercrime Center, requesting an investigation into the "possibility of state actor involvement" behind the attacks.
The trajectory of resistance under historical shadows
Tempo's resistance gene has a long history: in 1998, it was raided by the military for exposing military-political corruption, and in 2017, the editorial office received anonymous threats while investigating environmental crimes by palm oil giants. In March this year, the "beheading animal" package incident, after forensic identification, confirmed that the rat corpses contained military-grade preservatives, suggesting that the intimidators had special channels. Although the police summoned 8 suspects, the key evidence chain had been destroyed, and the case remains unresolved to this day.
A warning signal for the regional media ecosystem
Hassan Aziz, the executive director of the Southeast Asian Media Watch Organization (SEMPA), pointed out: "From Bangkok to Manila, outspoken media are facing 'Precision Strike 3.0'—from physical threats to digital destruction, and then to judicial entrapment, a triple siege." He specifically mentioned that the Cambodian online gambling group launders over 40 billion US dollars through Southeast Asia annually, forming a "political-business-media-black" interest community, and Tempo's investigation is like a dagger thrust into this dark empire.
As of the time of writing, Tempo continues to track the financial flow paths of the Cambodian online gambling group. The newspaper's cybersecurity team monitored that although the attack traffic has weakened, it still maintains an abnormal access volume of 300GB per day.
This battle to defend the truth in the digital age has transcended a single news event, becoming a litmus test for the rule of law in Southeast Asia. As Setri Yasra said: "When darkness tries to engulf the light, we need to become each other's source of light."
