After a cyber attack on national telecom operator Optus and Insurance company Medibank, the Australian government has hacked the hackers in order to bring them to knees. Australian Cybersecurity Minister Clare O’Neil will take a decision on this note and news is out that the government wants to take serious action against state funded hackers and so might go ahead with the said plan.
Australian Fed is extremely concerned with exposed sensitive health data and theft and wants to block the threat hackers from been misused. For this reason, it has begun the work to track the criminals and hack their servers to siphon the information they possess about millions of customers.
The move seems to be naïve, if seen on paper! But isn’t new as United States NSA has conducted such digital acts in the past and has been doing so since 2012. And related evidence can be sensed from the interview given by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, now freely available to listen on a popular streaming platform owned by Google.
But there is a flip-side to such events. What if the state actor, Russia’s Killnet in this case, retaliates with more sophistication or starts using other tools to create an apocalypse such as a blackout or a nuclear fallout?
For instance, the nuclear attack on Hiroshima in the 1960s proved fatal for almost two decades or so.
Meaning such hack-back acts can lead to devastating results and can prove fatal to entire mankind.
Instead, a combined move by all nations or at least by developed countries in the West can help to take control of the situation.
Already, information sharing on cyber threats emerging from nations like North Korea, Iran, Russia and China is helping other nations take up proactive security measures to safeguard their critical infrastructure. Nevertheless, there needs to be a fair-point through which a pressure building scenario on countries launching cyber attacks needs to be steered and that’s difficult, especially after the war between Ukraine and Putin started.
