Australia affected by a major State-funded Cyber Attack

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has made it official that all the government websites, public and private companies, and some high-end officials were being targeted by state-funded cyber attacks from the past few months. However, Morrison denied to name any state-funded actor or group in his statement and reiterated that no classified data was leaked in the cyber incident.

Scott Morrison said that the Cybersecurity experts have termed the latest attack as a state-funded act due to the nature of targeting on the trade crafts bodies and critical infrastructures. And for obvious reasons, Mr. Morrison did not want to make any public attribution on this note.

Previously, security experts linked such attacks to countries like Russia, China, and North Korea as they are not allied with the Australian objectives on economic, political, and governance-related fields said Peter Jennings, the head of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

According to a press release of the Australian Cyber Security Center, the attack can be attributed to a Copy-paste technique where the hacker/s compromises a website or a database with open source code to sneak into the network and access data or launch cyberattacks furthermore.

As awareness plays a vital role in keeping the populace in the loop with the officials, the cyberattack was made public to help organizations raise their defense levels to thwart cyber activities of any scale.

Note- In May 2019, Australian Intelligence concluded that their parliament elections were digitally intercepted by the Chinese hacking group. However, Linda Reynolds, the defense minister, assured that none of the election infrastructures was influenced by the state-funded attack.