UNI UNDER CYBER SIEGE

UTAS CALLS FOR HELP OVER DAILY ONLINE ATTACKS

FOREIGN countries and cyber criminals are believed to be behind attempts to steal valuable research from the University of Tasmania, which wants help from top cyber spies to tackle the daily online attacks.

THE University of Tasmania is calling out for help from Australia’s top cyber spies after battling daily online attacks.

Foreign countries and cyber criminals are believed to be behind the digital attempts to steal valuable research.

UTAS Vice Chancellor Rufus Black has flagged cyber attacks as the “most regular, intense and sustained threat” to the university in a submission to a federal parliamentary inquiry on national security risks to the higher education sector.

“We deal with large numbers of daily attempts to break into our university network by a range of foreign actors and other malicious non-government agents, cyber criminals and insider threats; all related to foreign influence,” the submission says.

While Professor Black said UTAS had strong cyber defences in place, he called for more help from the country’s cyber intelligence agency, the Australian Signals Directorate.

“The hostility of cyber space is so persistent in seeking to gain access … it’s a constant challenge,” he said.

Professor Black also said Australia needed to be more “sophisticated” in its efforts to tackle foreign influence.

He said the Australian government had been too focused on defensive measures to stop foreign influence and should be more active in wielding soft power instead, particularly through research collaborations with other countries.

“If we keep saying ‘We’re under terrible threat, it’s all hostile’, and the paradigm is defence, we will actually not be able to influence in the ways we need to protect [things like] fish stocks, or advance the climate change agenda,” Professor Black said.

It comes after the federal government last year introduced new laws that would allow it to review and scrap agreements universities, local governments and state governments have made with foreign governments.

Building stronger relations through soft power would also make Australia more resilient to trade shocks, such as with China, Professor Black said.

In the submission, UTAS calls on the federal government to give universities realtime information about “high risk foreign entities” and “risk ‘hot spots’ for high risk foreign countries” so they could more readily identify foreign influence threats. It also urges the government to review its foreign influence transparency register, which publicly lists individuals or organisations that lobby on behalf or represent foreign powers.

UTAS reviewed more than 1300 university activities and identified 154 as possibly needing to be registered for foreign influence, but none met the government’s threshold to be on the list.

Professor Black also suggested more institutions adopt UTAS’s approach to research, which includes stronger protections for the most valuable “crown jewels” of research and keeps the bulk of knowledge freely available.

Cyber security expert Nigel Phair, from the University of NSW, said foreign cyber spies were the most likely culprits targeting universities, either to interfere with Australia’s interests, to steal research or to monitor students. “Cyber criminals don’t really care for hacking or otherwise a university because they’re in it for the money,” he said.

Mr Phair backed UTAS’s call to get more real-time information on the threats.

The parliamentary inquiry was launched by Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton in November.