China Responsible for Cyber Attacks on Australian Parliament?

Is China Behind the Attacks on the Australian Parliament?

Australian Prime minister Scott Morrison announced that a sophisticated attack on the network of Australian Parliament and political parties were tried multiple times this week.

The Federal Agencies, the Liberal party, National Party and Labor Party were the hackers main target. According to cybersecurity experts, “Cyber attackers attempted to run cyber-intelligence operations on Australia’s political networks.”

Security sources indicate that China could be behind the last weeks' attacks. However, the spokesperson of China’s Foreign Ministry firmly opposed all the reports and blame.

Deputy Head of the ASPI's International Cyber Policy Centre Danielle Cave said, “Network breach was a state-sponsored cyber attack which needed a large network of computers, breach tactics and infrastructure.”

No other country than China has the potential and cyber capabilities to develop such attacks. Moreover historically, China has always been interested in Australian Politics and systems.

While Russia, Iran and North Korea are least interested, thus would not attack the country. But, China is very very interested!

Ms. Cave also said, “Presently we don’t know what was taken, what is installed in Australia’s network, but those networks are a goldmine of Australian intelligence.”

In 2016, Russian hackers successfully infiltrated presidential elections and campaign of Hilary Clinton that played a significant role in her narrow defeat to Donald Trump.

The cyber attack on the parliament of Australia happened after three days of a report that Australia had rejected a citizenship application of a prominent Chinese political donor Huang Xiangmo, who was living with his family since 2011.

Even more, the government of Australia also canceled his visa of residence while he was overseas.

Will Australia Take Action Against China?

Though Australian cybersecurity agencies couldn’t stop or prevent the attack from happening, they successfully identified the stage actor: China behind the attacks.

China is also responsible for the previous cyber attacks on Australia, but the Canberra attack publicly criticized them for being behind the malicious cyber activities.

Making an acquisition against China is diplomatically tricky at the International Courts of Justice because every country tends to attack others for the legitimate intelligence collection.

“This time we were in the queue. Therefore, without investigation of the cyber attack on Australia, presenting irresponsible reports, pressurizing and accusations will only increase the tensions in cyberspace which then will not be good,” said Ms. Cave.

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The center’s head Alastair MacGibbon said, “It is unclear what information did the intruder stole and did the intrusion removed forensic evidence or not”.

It is unclear how such a level of intrusion took place. Reports suggest that a level of expertise from Moscow or Beijing is associated with this cyber attack. The government in Canberra is accusing China to attack Australian entities in recent years.

It is accepted that now an international community will deal with this cybersecurity issue where Australian Security Agencies might submit abundant evidence to make their speculation much strong.

Hence, the Australian government is ready to take measures for ensuring the integrity of their system for which the Australian Cyber Security Centre is ready with support to parties.

Ironically, Australia is the first Western nation to experience vulnerability in its online communications. This time the leak and privacy breach were in liberal democracies of the Australian government.

Though, we need to comprehensively upgrade our cyber defense systems and practices to more effectively guard against cybersecurity threats, as well as to respond in a timely and robust manner to prevent any intrusion in the future.

Thus, the best preventive step is to upgrade our cyber defense systems at home and office computers with those cybersecurity tools that could fight cyber attacks with their real-time protection feature, quarantine feature, web protection and anti-exploit technology.

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