At last the Australian government has announced that it will name and shame countries launching cyber attacks on its infra- indirectly hinting to nations like Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea that they need to think twice before launching cyber attacks on adversaries in near future.
Early this year, the New South Wales (NSW) government and other sensitive infrastructure related to Australia were targeted by a series of cyber attacks and the suspect is believed to be Beijing.
Thus, the Morrison led government appointed a top-level committee to respond to state funded cyber attacks on case-by-case basis chaired by Andrew Penn, the CEO of Telstra.
Penn and his team concluded that nations need to support each other and adopt a more prospective strategy to retaliate state based attacks.
As the dark web-based cyber crime is strengthening as per the needs of the hackers, Australia security agencies need to work on measures to up their operational levels on a par with the international partners like FBI and NCSC to combat with the growing menace by marking out 4 requirements deterrence, prevention, detection and resilience. The govt need to allot required budget to fulfill the above-stated requirements to the core.
Govt should increase automated databases that help share the information between the industry and government to help Telecom firms to block malicious websites and apps on an automated note.
Fergus Hanson, the Director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s International Cyber Policy Center added that attributing the nations behind the attacks is not enough as they also need to be internationally prosecuted to pay for the economic and reputation related loss caused by the cyber attacks.
Peter Dutton, the Home Minister of the government assured that they will take all recommendations into account and will include them into the 2020 Cyber Security Strategy releasing shortly.
