CYBER WAR
China blamed for cyber attack across ALL of Australia hurting essential services ‘in revenge over coronavirus row’
CHINA has been blamed for a massive cyberattack on Australia’s essential services - including hospitals - by experts.
PM Scott Morrison said targeted critical infrastructure and all levels of government.
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"We know it is a sophisticated state-based cyber actor because of the scale and nature of the ," he said at a press briefing in Canberra.
Morrison refused to publicly pin blame on China, as the trading partners' relationship has hit an all-time low.
The PM said “Australia doesn’t engage lightly in public attribution” but added that he couldn’t control speculation about who was responsible for the cyber campaign.
But Monash University international security expert Greg Barton said the malicious nature of much of the reported cyber crimes suggested it was part of deteriorating relations between China and Australia amid a row over coronavirus.
Beijing and Canberra have been at loggerheads since Australia - a key US ally - became the first nation to call for an inquiry into the origins of coronavirus in March.
'ONLY ONE COUNTRY'
China retaliated by slapping an 80 per cent tariff on Australian barley and telling students and tourists not to travel Down Under in an apparent attempt to damage the Aussie economy.
Barton said: “There’s no doubt that it’s China.
“It might be a bit of rattling of the cage and reminding us that we have some vulnerabilities and we could end up with some heavy costs that we really don’t want to think about.”
And Peter Jennings, head of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, told the that China, Russia and North Korea each boasts sophisticated cyber capabilities.
When it boils down to which has the motive, intent and purpose, however, "there is one country that has the skill, depth of capacity and a real motive to want to do it and that is China,” Jennings, an ex-defense official, added.
Morrison offered few details about the hack attacks and said it was difficult to understand whether the intrusions were motivated by desires to steal state secrets, intellectual property or the personal data of ordinary Australians.
Australian investigations to date had not uncovered any “large-scale personal data breaches,” Morrison said.
Many of the intrusions had been thwarted.
Morrison's statement comes a month after the New York Times revealed that a Western Australia government employee was targeted in a cyber attack reportedly linked to the Chinese military.
There’s no doubt that it’s China.
International security expert Greg Barton
A staff member in Premier Mark McGowan’s office was said to have received an email, with a Word document attached, from a known contact at the Indonesian embassy.
The attachment contained an invisible cyber attack tool with “alarming new capabilities” which hackers could use to remotely take over a computer and copy, delete or create files, while also carrying out extensive searches of the device’s data.
According to , an investigation by Israeli cybersecurity company Check Point Software Technologies identified the “Aria-body” tool as a weapon used by a group of hackers called Naikon that has previously been traced to the Chinese military.
The hacker was able to take over the computer used by an Indonesian diplomat in Canberra, complete a document the envoy was working on, then send it to the government employee.
A government spokesperson said: “The malicious email referred to in the article was detected by the Department of the Premier and Cabinet’s email security and blocked."
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POWER & WATER TARGETED
The Australian Cyber Security Center warned last month that “malicious cyber adversaries” were taking advantage of key staff at critical infrastructure working from home during the pandemic.
Power and water networks as well as transport and communications grids were threatened.
“We are continuing to see attempts to compromise Australia’s critical infrastructure,” agency head Abigail Bradshaw said.
“It is reprehensible that cybercriminals would seek to disrupt or conduct ransomware attacks against our essential services during a major health crisis,” she added.
The agency also reported “malicious cyber actors” were attempting to “damage or impair” hospitals and emergency response organizations outside Australia.
BREWERY THREAT
Sydney-based brewery giant Lion said on Friday it was continuing to recover from a ransomware attack last week.
The attacks come as China in recent weeks banned beef exports from Australia’s largest abattoirs, ended trade in Australian barley with a tariff wall and warned its citizens against visiting Australia.
The measures are widely interpreted as punishment for Australia’s advocacy of an independent probe into the origins and spread of the coronavirus pandemic, which has spread worldwide from Wuhan.
Australia’s foreign minister this week accused China of using the anxiety around the pandemic to undermine Western democracies by spreading disinformation online, prompting China to accuse Australia of disinformation.
CHINA: 'HYPED UP'
Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman, Zhao Lijian, said he believed the claims of hacking originated from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).
He told : "We've pointed out many times this institute has long been receiving funding from US arms companies, and the attacks coming from the institute are completely baseless.
"It has been hyping up, or creating, all kinds of anti-China topics.
"The attacks and the blame coming from this institute against China is totally baseless and nonsense."
MOST READ IN NEWS
Residents of developed countries are more likely to become victims of cybercrime, according to a new cyber risk index by NordVPN.
“Cybercriminals don’t look for victims, they look for opportunities — much like pickpockets in crowded places,” says digital privacy expert Daniel Markuson.
It ranked Australia as being at "high cyber risk", behind Iceland, the US, New Zealand and the UK.
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