Macquarie Government has weighed into the debate on the census debacle, saying it has seen almost daily DDoS attacks on government systems, and “all blame” for the census failure should not be aimed at the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
In fact, according to Macquarie, poorly defended business and home computers have contributed to the ABS attack.
“People should pause before casting all blame on the ABS for the reported cyber attack that brought down the census last night and ask themselves if they unwittingly played a part,” says Aidan Tudehope, the managing director of Macquarie Government, the government business division of Macquarie Telecom
Tudehope says Macquarie provides frontline defence to more than a third of federal government agencies through its secure Internet gateway, and the attacks on government systems “can be small and short, or big and sustained like the ABS attack, but all rely on poor security awareness among other people, allowing their computers to be ‘weaponised’."
{loadposition peter}According to Tudehope, while the people launching the attacks might be anywhere in the world, “the computers they are using are increasingly right here in Australia, making it more difficult to respond”.
“And, as computing power and network bandwidth expands, the number of zombie computers needed to launch a damaging attack becomes fewer.
“An attack on a scale that 10 years ago required tens of thousands of computers now might now be possible with a few thousand,” Tudehope notes.
And, Tudehope says corporate networks are particularly attractive targets because they can have huge capacity and many connections to the Internet.
“They are like the cyber equivalent of an aircraft carrier.
“Distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks are launched from botnets, which are networks of computers that have been secretly infected and are under the control of hackers.
“These can be individuals’ home computers or whole corporate networks.
“The hackers can have set these networks up over a long period of time and wait patiently to launch an attack from an army of ‘zombie’ computers,” Tudehope warns.
Tudehope said the “unfortunate episode” (ABS/census) should serve as a “clear message to the business community, in particular, that it needed to take seriously its responsibility to implement effective cyber security strategies”.
“You are not only protecting your systems when you do this, you are protecting the national institutions,” he concludes.