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Australian firms fear Beijing’s cyber tentacles

Originally published by The Australian,21 Apr 2010 

By Rowan Callick

AUSTRALIAN corporations are increasingly being targeted by cyber attacks from unknown parties in China, and as yet there is no effective defence.

The attacks come as cyber warfare intensifies globally, and as the Australia-China relationship stabilises after a turbulent 2009, including debate about Chinese investment, the arrest of Rio Tinto executive Stern Hu and the visit of Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer. On Friday, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will deliver an address at the Australian National University on the subject of “Australia and China in the world”.

Google has become the first major corporate victim of cyber attacks to speak out on the issue, as it pulled out of China.

The New York Times revealed yesterday that cyber-intruders stole “one of Google’s crown jewels”, the Gaia password system that controls access by millions of international users to almost all of Google’s web services. Last week the Optus network in Australia came under a denial of service (DOS) attack from China for about two hours, hitting a number of clients.

Jose Nazario, manager of security research at Arbor Networks in the US, said afterwards: “At this point, it’s rare to see countries filing complaints, formal or informal, over this sort of attack.”

So far, only the US has tackled China head-on over the cyber warfare issue. Mr Nazario said India and South Korea had complained about attacks from China, but not through official diplomatic channels.

In 2007, Estonia complained to Russia about cyber attacks.

Mr Nazario said in a paper for Britain’s parliament: “Previously, DOS attacks were designed to inflict punitive damage on the victim, but have since grown into sophisticated censorship tools.

Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters has reported that “the greatest threat of electronic attack to the UK comes from state actors”, especially Russia and China.

BHP-Billiton has always run its marketing operation out of Singapore, and Rio Tinto followed suit for its iron ore sales after the arrest of Hu and his Chinese colleagues last year.

Commercial espionage — or concern about it — has become so pervasive in China that international companies fly China-based staff overseas for especially sensitive conference calls.

 

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/australian-firms-fear-beijings-cyber-tentacles/story-e6frg8zx-1225856142427