The strategic shocks to come in 2021
Another certainty is that Australia will continue to be under full-on cyber assault, principally from China, but it’s also likely that the Russian Intelligence hack into America’s government, security and business networks via the Texas company SolarWinds will impact Australia.
The attack using a SolarWinds ‘Orion network monitoring product’ is so serious that the White House’s National Security Council met to discuss it last weekend. Notwithstanding President Donald Trump’s undisciplined tweet suggesting that China rather than Russia was the culprit, it seems most likely that Russian intelligence installed malign code into a legitimate SolarWinds update from March, which SolarWinds sent to 18,000 customers to install.
This software allowed attackers remote access to the unclassified databases of the Pentagon, the US military, intelligence agencies and the organisations managing America’s nuclear arsenal.
Should Australia be worried? A review of the government’s AusTender contract database reveals that many federal departments and agencies are recent customers of SolarWinds, including Defence’s Chief Information Officer Group, the equipment-purchasing Capability Acquisition and Sustainment Group, and the Defence Science and Technology Group.
Other recent Australian customers include the cyber intelligence agency the Australian Signals Directorate; the Department of Home Affairs; Austrade; the Department of Education, Skills and Employment; the Department of Finance; the Bureau of Meteorology; and the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency.
The strategic shocks to come in 2021 | The Strategist (aspistrategist.org.au)
I’m pretty sure the dinosaurs died out when they stopped gathering food and started having meetings to discuss gathering food
A bookshop is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking
CTRL + V!
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