security
To defuse another attack, Oz spies called foreign counterparts to tell them an op was a bust
Australia’s Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) has established dedicated teams to counter nation-state attacks on critical infrastructure, the org’s director general Mike Burgess revealed yesterday.“We discovered nation-state hackers had compromised the network of an Australian critical infrastructure provider,” Burgess said yesterday in remarks accompanying the release of ASIO’s annual threat assessment, a task it performs in its role as Australia’s equivalent to the FBI and MI5.“ASIO assessed the hackers were preparing for sabotage. They weren’t planting ‘digital dynamite’ as such; they were mapping out the network and maintaining access so they could cripple it at a time of their choosing.”
“In this case, a state-sponsored group didn’t just achieve access to the Australian critical infrastructure provider, it successfully acquired credentials – login details and passwords – for active users of the networks, including the IT professionals guarding it,” he added.
Burgess said ASIO “identified, tracked and attributed the hack, and worked with the victim company and our security partners to remediate the compromise – work which is ongoing.”“The scale of this activity – led by one nation-state in particular – is difficult to overstate,” he added, before saying Australia is not alone in facing such attacks. “We struggle to find a single country in our region that has not been compromised by this state’s cyber apparatus.”
