Australian Security Agencies have made it official that a hacking group related to state actors has attempted to hack the computer network of the Federal Parliament in Canberra. The authorities however cleared the air that the attack was blocked in the initial stages of its propagation and so no data compromise or leak could have taken place.
In a joint statement released by two presiding officers of Scott Ryan and Tony Smith, the cyber incident took place in the night hours of Thursday and got ahead to Friday morning.
Signs of not data breach have been reported and all passwords of the email systems have been reset as a precautionary measure.
Scott Ryan said that there is no evidence that the attack was launched to influence the outcome of parliamentary processes or to influence electoral or political stability. However, state-funded malicious actors are suspected behind the incident who could have launched the attack to steal state secrets.
The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) says that the attack could have been launched by state-funded actors suspected to be backed by China intelligence, as the preliminary inquiry has revealed that the IP addresses from which the attack was launched seem to be from the People’s Republic of China.
ABC Net aka Australian Broadcasting Corporation(ABC) was the first resource to report the incident to the world and added in its news report that more investigation will be needed to confirm the details of the culprit behind the attack.
Note- Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison gave an update to the world on Feb 18th,2019 that the hackers also accessed info from the databases of National, Labor, and Liberal parties. He also assured that the data on the National Electoral database remained untouched.
