‘State-backed’ hackers hit Australia govt, firms
NEWDELHI: Australia is being targeted by widespread cyberattacks originating from a “statebased” actor, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Friday, giving details of what some experts said indicate a clear link to China.
The attacks targeted the government, public services and private businesses, Morrison said at a press conference.
In more details released by the Australian Cyber Security Centre, the cyber campaign - named ‘copy-paste compromises’ appeared to deploy hacking techniques available publicly and exploited known flaws in some specific products and protocols.
“This activity is targeting Australian organisations across a range of sectors, including all levels of government, industry, political organisations, education, health, essential service providers and operators of other critical infrastructure,” Morrison said, according to news agency AFP.
“We know it is a sophisticated state-based cyber-actor because of the scale and nature of the targeting and the tradecraft used,” Morrison added.
While the Australian PM did not name any country, cyber security experts said the strongest suspicion fell on China.
“Many states have good cyber capabilities, but there are very few states that have the capability at the scale the Prime Minister talked about, affecting so many industries. The ones that possibly could at that scale: Russian, US, UK, China. I don’t see any motivation for the first three - they’ve either got a good relationship with us or have far higher priorities,” said Tom
Uren, senior analyst at Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s (ASPI) International Cyber Policy
Centre.
“Australia has been on China’s radar for years, and they have previously compromised all of the industries that the PM mentioned,” he said in an interview over email. The analyst added that the present attack appeared to be for stealing information instead of causing disruption or destruction.
The revelations in Australia come at a time when there have been concerns about cyber attacks from China targeting Indian digital infrastructure as a consequence of the escalation in hostilities between the two countries in Ladakh. HT reported on Thursday intelligence inputs that some attacks from Chinabased actors had been launched on Indian networks such as payment and ATM networks.
“In a conflict, espionage for military advantage is a dead certainty, but I’m not sure that China would try to disrupt Indian operations with cyber capabilities unless the conflict really escalated,” Uren said. He added that an attack of the kind seen in Australia could impact several sectors with valuable information.