{"id":65893,"date":"2021-07-21T13:15:19","date_gmt":"2021-07-21T03:15:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=65893"},"modified":"2021-07-21T12:23:40","modified_gmt":"2021-07-21T02:23:40","slug":"threats-to-australia-shift-to-new-domains-cyber-technology-and-information","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/threats-to-australia-shift-to-new-domains-cyber-technology-and-information\/","title":{"rendered":"Threats to Australia shift to new domains: cyber, technology and information"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Australia\u2019s strategic environment is changing rapidly. Once shaped exclusively by traditional security concerns where what mattered most were our military alliances, the state of our armed forces and diplomacy, today\u2019s environment is increasingly shaped by new domains. Chief among them: cyberspace, technology and our online information landscape. This overlapping trio is currently front-page news in a busy month that has highlighted just how entrenched this strategic shift now is.<\/p>\n

We have seen how the world\u2019s booming surveillance industry continues to be given permission to operate in the shadows, with dangerous consequences. Consider\u00a0stunning revelations<\/a>\u00a0that high-end spyware sold by Israel\u2019s most notorious spyware company, NSO Group, designed to track terrorists and criminals, was instead being used to spy on journalists, human rights activists, government ministers, diplomats and businesspeople in democracies and autocratic regimes alike. Ensnaring world leaders and several Arab royal family members and dominating media headlines from Europe to India, this expos\u00e9 may finally force a moment of reckoning for this unregulated and unchecked industry.<\/p>\n

Next we come to the\u00a0collision\u00a0of social media\u00a0with\u00a0the ongoing pandemic. Just last week, US President Joe Biden said social media platforms like Facebook\u00a0\u2018are killing people\u2019<\/a>\u00a0for allowing misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines to spread on their platforms, in some of his strongest language yet about the issue. The Covid-19 pandemic has pushed our already messy information environments\u00a0into a new era<\/a>\u00a0where we can see the daily erosion of credible information online. The president\u2019s comments come at a time when tensions between democracies and US internet companies are at an all-time high as they continue to spar about how to moderate our information ecosystem, while keeping it as free and open as possible.<\/p>\n

Then on Monday we saw an unprecedented global coalition come together, including Five Eyes alliance members, European countries and Japan, to hold the Chinese state \u2018responsible for gaining access to computer networks around the world via Microsoft Exchange servers\u2019. For the first time, NATO joined in with a public statement calling on China to\u00a0act\u00a0in line with internationally agreed norms of behaviour. The Chinese state\u2019s voracious appetite for wide-ranging intelligence collection, intellectual property theft and foreign interference activities have prompted a growing global culture of collective attribution and action that will continue far into the future.<\/p>\n

For Australia, this is a significant development that reinforces the importance of the cyber domain. Attributing malicious cyber behaviour to countries like Russia, Iran and North Korea\u2014something Australia has done several times over the past few years\u2014brings far fewer complications.\u00a0Attributing such behaviour<\/a>\u00a0to our largest trading partner, which has shown itself to favour economic coercion and wolf warrior diplomacy in dealing with so many of its bilateral relationships around the world, is fraught but necessary.<\/p>\n

The Biden administration concurrently released a\u00a0Department of Justice indictment<\/a>\u00a0that named and shamed four hackers from China\u2019s Ministry of State Security\u2014the country\u2019s sprawling domestic intelligence agency (whose international operations, cyber included, are vast). An additional part of the US announcements was the release of a\u00a0unique and detailed report<\/a>\u00a0listing more than 50 tactics and techniques used by Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors to target US and allied networks. Importantly, this report also provided actionable recommendations for how targeted organisations could detect and mitigate the risks of these operations.<\/p>\n

Such useful advice should inspire other governments, Australia included, to provide more\u00a0practical\u00a0advice tailored to dealing with our key threat actors in cyberspace (state and non-state alike). While large parts of the Australian public service still prefer a \u2018country agnostic\u2019 approach to policymaking and planning, such a stance leaves us at a disadvantage and ill-equipped to deal with the actual threats we face.<\/p>\n

More than anything, developments this month highlight the importance of Australia getting its own house in order.<\/p>\n

The Australian public is informed about the stakes at play. The recent 2021 Lowy Institute poll found that 98% of Australians viewed \u2018cyber attacks from other countries\u2019 as a critical (62%) or important (36%) threat to Australia over the next decade, beating out other enormously important issues including climate change, international terrorism and a severe downturn in the global economy.<\/p>\n

There is positive momentum underway\u2014across government and the business community\u2014to boost our cybersecurity posture and culture. However cyber, technology and information ecosystems are a trio of overlapping policy issues, and one can\u2019t be tackled without the others. Having a cybersecurity strategy alone, for example, doesn\u2019t provide the toolkit to deal with the global rise in cyber-enabled foreign interference that is currently targeting populations around the world via a suite of online platforms from YouTube to TikTok. This is an issue the Australian government is currently struggling to deal with, having yet to assign an agency to lead on countering this new threat.<\/p>\n

While we wait for policymaking to catch up, it is worth noting that parliamentarians increasingly see this gap. Our savviest politicians now know that, beyond their immediate patch, there are two key issues they and their advisers need to get across\u2014and stay across. The first is this new domain of cyber, information and technology threats. And the second? China, of course.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Australia\u2019s strategic environment is changing rapidly. Once shaped exclusively by traditional security concerns where what mattered most were our military alliances, the state of our armed forces and diplomacy, today\u2019s environment is increasingly shaped by …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":691,"featured_media":65895,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2212,2138,2595],"class_list":["post-65893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-australia-china-relations","tag-cybersecurity","tag-foreign-interference"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThreats to Australia shift to new domains: cyber, technology and information | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/threats-to-australia-shift-to-new-domains-cyber-technology-and-information\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Threats to Australia shift to new domains: cyber, technology and information | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Australia\u2019s strategic environment is changing rapidly. 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