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.
Australian PM Scott Morrison said targeted critical infrastructure and all levels of government.
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.
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.
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."
"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."
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.