Tag: Australia
18. February 2019
Prime Minister Scott Morrison reports that the governing Liberal Party of Australia and the governing National Party of Australia as well as the strongest opposition party, Labor Party were the target of an cyber attack on Parliament’s server. It is assumed that the server was attacked by a foreign government. Not affected by the breach were the ministers an their offices because they operate on different computer servers.
The attack was discovered on the 8th of February 2019 during an investigation of a breach of Parliament House’s computer. According to the statement of the nation’s chief cyber security adviser, Alistair MacGibbon, who is the head of the Australian Cyber Security Centre, it is too early to tell whether and what information the hackers had accessed.
At the moment, election influences of the upcoming nationwide elections can be excluded.
As a first measure the security agency reset passwords after detecting the breach so that the politicians and their staff lost access to their emails.
22. August 2018
A 16-year-old boy from Melbourne, Australia broke into Apple‘s internal computer systems and downloaded 90GB of data, as reported by Australian newspaper The Age. The teenager acquired possession of “authorised keys“ and had access to Apple’s network for approximately a year.
Last year Apple reported the incident to the FBI who then pointed it out to the Australian Federal Police (AFP). They found the sensitive documents in a computer folder named “hacky hack hack“. Apple succeeded to keep this incident out of media until the court proceedings last week.
The 16-year-old boy has pleaded guilty. According to his lawyer, the teenager broke into the network because he is a huge apple fan who wants to work for the company in the future. A verdict is expected at the end of September.
Apple is now trying to reassure its customers. According to a spokesman of the company, no personal data was compromised.
5. December 2017
The Australian government is considering making facial recognition data available for private companies.
By paying a fee they are supposed to get access to data originally collected for the sake of national security.
However, the companies are to be restricted to cases where the person has given her/his consent.
In an interview with The Guardian, Monique Mann, a director of the Australian Privacy Foundation and a lecturer at the faculty of law at the Queensland University of Technology, says that requiring companies to ask for consent may not be enough to protect consumers’ rights or mitigate the risks involved with biometric data, and would encourage firms to store more data.
As also reported by The Guardian, the government struck a deal with states and territories over the controversial national facial recognition database last month. It is said, that according to the documents, which predate the agreement, at that time 50% of the population was already included in the database.
With the help of state and territory governments, the federal Attorney General’s Department planned to expand that number to cover 85% of Australians.
