China, Russia and our cyber ‘reckoning’
Sam Hawley: Hi, I’m Sam Hawley, coming to you from Gadigal land. This is ABC News Daily. Did you know there’s a cyber attack reported in Australia every six minutes? In the past 18 months, we’ve seen some of the biggest hacks in our history, including against Optus and Medibank. There are criminal groups trying to disrupt our lives and steal our data, but it’s countries like China and Russia that are also becoming more aggressive in targeting Australian businesses and government secrets. Today, Executive Director of Cyber Intelligence at CyberCX, Katherine Mansted, on why the threat is increasing and how we can protect ourselves.
Katherine, it certainly felt like we’ve had a lot of cyber attacks in the past year or so, some pretty big ones in the last little while…
Katherine Mansted: I think it’s fair to say that Australia has had something of a cybersecurity reckoning in the last 12 to 18 months, partly because a lot of the cyber attacks we’ve experienced have hit household brand names that affect a lot of consumers. There are millions of Australians, perhaps up to one in two, if not more, of us who’ve had our data breached in the past 18 months.
ABC News clip: Millions of Australians are being warned they could face a higher risk of online scams and identity theft, after Optus revealed it was hit by one of the biggest cyber attacks in Australian history…
ABC News clip: The criminal group that says it hacked Medibank is believed to have gained records of nearly 10 million people…
Katherine Mansted: We’ve also seen these cyber attacks play out in real time on TV, which has really just brought a renewed consciousness of cyber and cyber insecurity into everyone’s home.
Sam Hawley: And of course, there’s so many that we don’t know about that don’t make the news. Australia’s cyber spy agency, the Australian Signals Directorate, knows about these, though, and it has released some information about what it’s been monitoring in the past 12 months. So what do we know from what it’s said?
Katherine Mansted: Cyber crime is systematically underreported in this country. So the Australian Signals Directorate has a view. However, realistically it’s only the tip of the iceberg. What we’ve heard from the Australian Signals Directorate is that they themselves were involved in just about over a thousand incidents this year, but they acknowledge that that’s a small sample size. And in fact, the cyber security strategy that the government released in November points to the fact that we need to get better reporting in this country.
Sam Hawley: Right. Yeah. And in its annual report, the ASD, the Australian Signals Directorate, it did reveal that there’d been a 23 per cent surge in cyber crimes reported to the agency, up to 94,000. So that’s one cyber attack every six minutes. It’s a lot.
Katherine Mansted: That’s right. That’s that’s reports from the community phoning in and saying there’s been a cyber incident that they think they’ve been affected by. And on average that comes to one every six minutes, which is a huge volume. And I think it shows that we’ve got really two issues when it comes to cyber crime. One is the high volume, relentless cyber crime scams that affects all of us, every citizen. And then you have another class of cyber attacks. And these are the cyber attacks that we’re talking about when we talk about those big name Medibank, Optus, Latitude Financial, DP World that play out across our media, they are much more capable attacks. They’re generally carried out by offshore criminal syndicates, and they cause a lot more harm at scale to the victims. So there’s two types. One is that relentless death by a thousand cuts, and one is the much more targeted, harmful foreign based cyber criminal syndicate activity. Both of course, can cause a lot of harm, not just to businesses, but of course to the individuals that make up the communities those businesses serve.
Sam Hawley: Mhm. All right. And of course, Katherine, what’s really interesting and intriguing about all of this is what we know about who is behind these attacks. Of course, there are criminal groups who are after money, but there are also state actors, that is, attacks from other nations. And the ASD has pointed to these state actors. So tell me more about that…
Katherine Mansted: The Australian government is pulling no punches when it comes to pointing the finger at foreign governments that are using cyberspace in a way that hurts Australians and hurts our interests, and I think that’s a good thing, that transparency is a really positive thing. The Australian government has called out China, it’s called out Russia. It’s also called out joined a multilateral attributions pointing the finger at Iran and North Korea for irresponsible behaviour in cyber space. And the government again, has been quite pointed when it comes to China to say that China’s theft of intellectual property, China’s wide scale espionage against strategic information, but also economic information is unprecedented in human history. It is at a scale and a rate and a pace we just haven’t seen before. And it doesn’t just affect governments, it also affects businesses, innovators, technologists and ordinary day to day Australians whose personal information gets hoovered up in global espionage operations.
Sam Hawley: Hmm. The head of ASIO, Mike Burgess. He’s warned that China is engaged in the most sustained, sophisticated and scaled threat of intellectual property and expertise in human history…
Mike Burgess, ASIO director general of security: It’s unacceptable. It’s unprecedented. China has developed a ruthless business model aimed at seizing commercial advantage. The threats facing the tech sector are serious, but not insurmountable…
Sam Hawley: …so that sounds pretty serious.
Katherine Mansted: Pretty bold words, right?
Sam Hawley: Yeah, really. And what sort of information is China trying to gather here?
Katherine Mansted: Well, like any form of espionage, and espionage is one of the world’s oldest professions, part of it’s about government secrets, defence secrets. And the other part, though, and this is where I think it becomes even more concerning, comes down to IP, comes down to commercial information that can give a foreign government an edge in its pursuit of dominance in next generation technologies like AI or really important critical markets like renewable energy or critical minerals. And then there’s a third part, and this one is even more harmful when it comes to taking and hoovering up personal information. And we know that not just China, frankly, but a lot of foreign governments have a voracious appetite for personal information on Australians that helps them profile political sentiment, identify people of influence and power to shape public opinions and behaviours. And then also there is a view, particularly among authoritarian foreign governments, that in some sense they are entitled to the information on members of their diaspora who are Australian citizens or journalists or activists or perceived dissidents. And that’s where these issues around cybersecurity collide really sharply with with issues of human rights.
Sam Hawley: Mhm. Okay. So hang on China is after information on our personal phones?
Katherine Mansted: Yeah I mean absolutely. There is a sense in which and again it’s not just China a lot of authoritarian foreign governments want to be able to surveil and track people of interest to them, even when they’re in Australia. Foreign governments don’t distinguish. They don’t distinguish between government or civilian often when it comes to stealing data. And they do have an interest in tracking, surveilling and sometimes interfering with and coercing people that they think are of interest to them, even when they’re residents or citizens in Australia.
Sam Hawley: Hmm okay. And it’s not just information I guess that is of interest to these state actors. It’s also our critical infrastructure isn’t it. Just remind me what is critical infrastructure? And what nations like China and Russia might be after?
Katherine Mansted: I mean critical infrastructure is the terms that the Australian government uses for essential services anything that is key to our economic prosperity as a country, our national security. So that includes things, for example, like our transport systems, our energy systems, but also our financial services, our education, our health care. These are the things that really matter for Australia’s day to day survival. What we see, unfortunately, again, is a lot of these nation state cyber powers see cyberspace as their playground. They don’t distinguish between, say, military targets and civilian targets. We see, for example, Russia as its troops crossed the border into Ukraine, Russian cyber spies launched a cyber attack against Ukraine’s communication system, knocking out the satellite communications that provided a huge amount of Ukraine’s ability to conduct command and control to communicate as it was being invaded. So the risk there is that just as nation states attempt to coerce us using other means, whether that’s trade means or or sharp diplomacy, they may seek to coerce us using cyber means as well. And particularly in the last year, there has been more reporting from industry and also from government associating foreign nation states with pre-positioning in critical infrastructure globally. So hacking in now to preserve that access secretly and silently, so that at some future point, they might be able to use that access to disrupt the critical infrastructure, just as we saw Russia do as it invaded Ukraine.
Sam Hawley: Mhm. How serious Katherine could it get? Could a hostile state actually shut down an entire network, for instance, that we heavily rely on?
Katherine Mansted: Look, I think cyber is a new means by which states compete and coerce each other, but it doesn’t completely throw the logic of international politics out the window. So. So what I would say to that is just as we wouldn’t expect a foreign government to come in and invade Australia tomorrow, so too, we shouldn’t necessarily expect a massive cyber attack. However, if we were to get to a point and we know that the region of the world we live in, the Indo-Pacific is no longer as benign as it once was, it is increasingly a site of geopolitical contest. If we were to see that contest escalate, undoubtedly we would expect to see an increase in nation state cyber attacks.
Sam Hawley: All right, so tell me, what should we be doing that we’re not already doing to protect ourselves?
Katherine Mansted: So I think this comes back to the idea again, that it is actually civilians and citizens and businesses that are on the front line here and doing the basics of cyber security. If you’re an individual, good passwords, multi-factor authentication, being aware of phishing emails, all of that sounds really basic, but it’s actually incredibly meaningful because even if you’re a very capable global cyber crime syndicate, or even if you are a nation state cyber spy, you often use the lowest hanging fruit. If you can break in because someone has left the window open or hasn’t locked the door, you will. So if we get the basics right, that can actually make a hugely meaningful difference. It can lift the resilience across the economy and push back against some pretty ugly forces that are trying to harm Australians.
Sam Hawley: Because it does sound like the threat is only going to continue to grow…
Katherine Mansted: Yeah, absolutely. I think we have to be clear eyed about this. And the cyber minister, Clare O’Neil, has been she’s been very clear in saying that there is no policy intervention that she can make that will stop cyber incidents and cyber attacks from happening.
Clare O’Neil, Minister for Home Affairs: There is no politician in the world, no politician in our country, who can look their citizens in the eye and say that we’re not going to have any more cyber attacks. There is no public policy option here that reduces cyber risk to zero…
Katherine Mansted: I would expect in the next year or two this will get worse before hopefully it gets better, but it’s not going to get better and it’s not going to even stabilise in the next year or two. We will keep seeing cyber criminals using cyberspace and cyber attacks to make money, and we will keep seeing nation states using cyber attacks to advantage their interests.
Sam Hawley: Katherine Mansted is the Executive Director of Cyber Intelligence at CyberCX. You may have seen the government has a new strategy to reduce the overall migration intake. We covered the issue of migration and economic growth last week with our business editor, Ian Verrender. Look for should we hit pause on immigration? That’s in your feed. This episode was produced by Bridget Fitzgerald, Nell Whitehead, Laura Corrigan, Anna John and Sam Dunn, who also did the mix. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I’m Sam Hawley. ABC News Daily will be back again tomorrow. Thanks for listening.
