[LINK] Fin Review: The Reserve Bank of Australia has been hacked by the Chinese

[Tom Worthington]

On 12/03/13 08:11, Karl Auer wrote:
> On Tue, 2013-03-12 at 07:50 +1100, Kim Holburn wrote:
>> http://www.afr.com/p/national/cyber_attackers_penetrate_reserve_FEdCLOI50owRMgI0urEYnK
>
> Summary: Spear-phishing attack succeeds due to IT naivety of senior bank
> officials.

Yes, that is essentially how the recent cyber-attacks have been 
operating. But it is easy for even a well trained employee to mistake a 
malicious message for a genuine one. Organizations need to be filtering 
out these messages.

Also it is time for Australia to make it clear that it considers state 
sanctioned cyber-attack on government, military or civilian 
infrastructure to be an act of war. Response would be commensurate with 
the intent and effect of the attack and could be by cyber-attack, 
electronic warfare or conventional military force.

Australia has, and is acquiring more, electronic warfare aircraft which 
can temporally disable, or destroy, electronic equipment from a 
distance. Special forces, as well as air and submarine launched weapons, 
can be used to destroy facilities. Such a response may not be announced 
publicly and the state concerned may prefer to pretend that their 
facilities suffered from an "accident" (due to an electrical overload or 
gas leak), rather than admit vulnerability.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
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Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science,
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/