Antinuclear

Australian government considering changes to communications and privacy laws

Australia’s electronic spy agency, the Defence Signals Directorate, (DSD)  is Australia’s equivalent to America’s National Security Agency( NSA)  and has no qualms advertising its twin missions: “One is collecting foreign intelligence by interception. The other is working to stop people doing the same to us,” Burgess says….. The ordinarily shadowy DSD has published a detailed study on its top 35 cyber “mitigation strategies”. 

Under Operation Australia, which has protested new data retention proposals, Anonymous shut down more than 10 Australian government sites, including ASIO’s, in July last year using denial of service attacks.

ASIO advocates reforms to communications and privacy laws to provide basic cyber-insurance. 

Attorney-General Nicola Roxon has referred the proposals to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security.

It’s global cyber war out there, Financial Review, Christopher Joye, 2 Jan 13, 
“..Australia’s most experienced spy master,  the director-general of ASIO, David Irvine, has a lot on his mind
…… with the privatisation of so many utilities over the past three decades, government has unwittingly delegated national security to business.

This is why ASIO believes national security reforms need to be made to the regulations governing essential infrastructure, including telecommunications.
“The more rocks we turn over in cyberspace, the more we find . . . the internet and increased connectivity has expanded infinitely the opportunities for [these threats]”, Irvine says.

Just as global banking systems were not sufficiently well-capitalised to absorb the losses that suddenly materialised in 2008, Australian spooks worry that business does not have enough insurance against major unexpected cyber events, either.

And Irvine understands that infrastructure represents merely one tactical vulnerability in the vast cyber-threat matrix, which includes state and non-state espionage, organised crime, and the new prospect of cyber terror…..
The Chinese were fingered in the hacking of Barack Obama’s and John McCain’s computers in the 2008 US presidential election campaign. In 2011 they allegedly penetrated the parliamentary email systems of 10 Australian federal ministers, including Prime Minister Julia Gillard, and compromised emails belonging to the European Union President and his advisers…..
Since about 2010, Irvine has seen the Americans and Israelis launch the most sophisticated cyber weapons in history, to destroy parts of Iran’s nuclear program. He’s watched the Iranians retaliate by immobilising the websites of scores of US financial institutions, and unleashing powerful malware on US ally Saudi Arabia, which disabled 30,000 computers.

ASIO’s new cyber security unit has monitored with mounting alarm the emergence of avowedly anarchic, non-state actors like Anonymous, which have targeted Western nations and companies with disruptive attacks that foreshadow an apocalyptic fusion between cyber-capabilities and terrorism……
Irvine believes the multiplicity of unprecedented and underappreciated risks is every bit as complex and consequential as those tackled by his predecessors.

“Electronic intelligence gathering is being used against Australia on a massive scale to extract confidential information from governments, the private sector and ordinary individuals,” he says.

“It is used to steal intellectual property, all kinds of defence secrets, weapons designs, and commercially advantageous information. The security threat presented by the exploitation . . . of the cyber world is both pervasive and insidious. It is ubiquitous and is enabled by what we would normally expect to be a great social and economic good – technological advance.”….
the US reserves the right to pre-emptively cauterise cyber menaces with force and/or through its arsenal of digital weapons, which have been privately listed for the first time…..
To help safeguard domestic assets against unremitting cyber-offensives, ASIO is championing data retention laws requiring communications suppliers to store basic information, such as the type, time, duration, and identifiers of parties to the exchange, for at least two years. ASIO’s concern is this data, which is the minimum it says it needs to adequately investigate threats, is being discarded by second-tier communications companies, like small ISPs…..

Australia’s electronic spy agency, the Defence Signals Directorate, (DSD)  is Australia’s equivalent to America’s National Security Agency( NSA)  and has no qualms advertising its twin missions: “One is collecting foreign intelligence by interception. The other is working to stop people doing the same to us,” Burgess says….. The ordinarily shadowy DSD has published a detailed study on its top 35 cyber “mitigation strategies”.

While guarding Australia from digital enemies DSD also hacks into foreign sites. A final objective is preparing for “offensive” cyber warfare. Burgess puts it bluntly: “In the cyber safari, DSD is the poacher and the gamekeeper.”…..
The most infamous malware, Stuxnet, was discovered in June 2010. It exploited four previously unknown “zero-day” back-door vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows to infiltrate Iranian networks. A single zero-day can be worth more than $1 million on the black market.
……A final cyber-risk that worries agencies is the emergence of anarchic non-state organisations motivated to dislocate our way of life to express dissent about public decisions. The most high-profile example is Anonymous, a cellular and leaderless group of hactivists.

Under Operation Australia, which has protested new data retention proposals, Anonymous shut down more than 10 Australian government sites, including ASIO’s, in July last year using denial of service attacks.

It also executed a devastating hack of AAPT’s servers, which resulted in 236,000 phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth, user names and passwords being stolen.

This affected the Reserve Bank of Australia, the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission and the Australian Crime Commission.

Two months ago, Anonymous penetrated Australian Defence Force Academy databases and released the names, rank, dates of birth, and passwords of up to 1900 ADFA staff and 10,000 students. “The danger is that such attacks by malicious individuals could have significant impacts if our telecommunications networks are impeded leading to failures in other areas of essential services” Irvine says.

January 2, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, civil liberties, secrets and lies