This article is a transcript of the podcast it will give a brief summary of the latest news related to cyber intelligence and proactive cyber security in only a few minutes.
This podcast is aimed at professionals who are short on time, or for anyone who would like to know a bit more about what is REALLY happening out there in the cyber world.
In this podcast we will focus on the latest cyber events for non-technical people; anyone can listen and understand.
In this podcast we will examine some of the cyber incidents happening this days in Australia.
It looks like some unknown entity is targeting Australia with cyber campaign, trying to cause damage gain profit on the way.
Two weeks ago, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has revealed Australia's political parties suffered cyber attacks alongside the Parliament House computer network by a "sophisticated state actor".
While not officially stating the country, the blame and suspicions were mainly aimed at China.
However, a flow of unnamed sources disclosed that there are only 4 countries with such high cyber capabilities and they are China, Russia, Israel and the United States and pointed the blame over the People Liberation Army of China.
China Foreign minister responded in a press release and warned against “baseless speculations” in the wake of a cyber attack on Parliament.
To make things more confusing, some security researchers started to claim the attack on the parliament was carried out by the Iranian revolutionary guard and that they were able to connect the specific attack to specific institute belong to the army and located in Teheran.
For now, no one really knows who is really behind this attack.
On the same day, it is also been published that a cyber attack was carried out against local hospital and encrypted more than 15,000 medical files of patients with ransomware requiring to pay money.
It has been said the hospital paid and most of the files were restored, however some files have been reported lost. The blame in this case was pointed to russian hackers but the same as the other incident, no one officially blamed any state actor for this attack.
At the end of the report about the cyber attack, the spokeswoman chose to add additional comment. She stressed there was no link between the encrypted data and any function relating to cardiac implantable electrical devices, such as pacemakers and defibrillators.
This is important point, might it be a sophisticated attack? Cyber attack that is actually targeting medical devices like pacemakers and other medical devices. If thats the case , the ransomware might have been just a distraction to keep the hospital busy and distracted from what is really going there.
Few days goes by and another major company announce it have been targeted by hackers, Toyota Australia , The attack locked its employees from accessing email for days.
Staff, who are continuing to work despite the incident, have been instructed to use “face-to-face communications, phone and text” until emails were recovered.
In less than one month we are seen Australia getting hit by severe cyber attacks without the ability to properly handle them. Whether this are isolated incidents that just by coincidence executed successfully on the same time or if its more complicated campaign that evolves to something with strategic meanings time will tell.
Todays threats are fast evolving and many times very sophisticated.
using cyber intelligence, companies and governments can compliment their security tools with the additional intelligence that will allow them to handle and block those dangerous cyber attacks.
Don’t forget to visit www.cybercure.ai for the latest podcasts and cyber intelligence.
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