News Insights: Australia’s government and political parties hit by cyber attack from ‘sophisticated state actor’

News Insights:

According to Kevin Bocek, vice president of security strategy and threat intelligence at Venafi, provided the following comments:

“Unfortunately, at the same time the Australia government is looking to control the cybersecurity protections  businesses can use, the Australian government and political parties are under attack by sophisticated attackers. Instead of placing restrictions and possible backdoors in the use of encryption and machine identities, the government should be spending all its energy on protecting its citizens, protecting the public sector and helping businesses reduce cyber security risk.

“Research showing that 93% of IT security professionals, including those in Australia, expect that we’ll continue to see more attacks on political infrastructure. Nation state attackers want to increase the level of chaos and distrust in government and steal national secrets. The new rules on use of encryption that leave machine identities open to attack are exactly what enemies want.

“And just as we saw with attacks on the German Bundestag, our adversaries will leave us guessing about their next move while politicians are focused on the wrong things. This attack demonstrates that attackers won’t abide by arbitrary national restrictions on encryption and machine identities.”