Cyber Security a Grave Concern for Australia: Malcolm Turnbull

The Australian Prime Minister, Malcom Turnbull declared that the Numero- Uno agenda of the government is to protect its citizens from cyber crime as well as cyber attacks. PM Turnbull branded cyber crimes as the ‘new Frontier in Warfare’. There was a high level briefing on security during the Australian Defense Signals Directorate meet. Post the alleged Russian tampering in the US Presidential elections; although no traces of the same are uncovered in Australian elections, security is a national concern. The fiasco of Russian involvement was a controversy till the time the same was acknowledged in the ‘Fake News.’

Government Departments are Prime Targets

The implementation of new programs comes as the first step towards the identification of serious cyber crimes. Although, Australia does not face the same gravity of cyber attacks as US or UK, it also lacks the right tools for identification of such crimes, if they were to appear. An example of a wide scale attack is the recent Telstra outrage that spread across the entire country. This attack goes to say that if someone were determined to incapacitate the entire nation, they could do so by making the infrastructure a prime target.

The government also reported a breach in the computers of Bureau of Meteorology. The origin of the attack was traced back to China. Post the breach, over 97 Federal Agencies were instructed to encrypt all the horded data.

Australia Launches a New Security Strategy

The Australian government launched a new $230 million defense strategy to strengthen and patch the gaps in cyber security. This strategy grants access to take offensive actions should the need arise, in the protection of nation interest. Security is no more a mirage but a quantifiable threat with grave implications. Other important security agencies also received a funding: a total of $400 million was allotted in order to improve the hacking finesse of staff within the Australian Signals Directorate and the Department of Defense will now add around 800 new roles for cyber intelligence.

There is however, no factual information to support that there was a hack into the Australian electoral system, but the PM urges that even though the country is in the clear, it is better to have a bolstered security in place when the threat is omnipresent. With the imminent state elections, security is given the highest prominence.