The threat of China severing sea cables to cut Australia’s internet access has pushed Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke to launch a security assessment into seabed security, as Labor boosts training among office workers to avoid a catastrophic hacking incident.
As AI allows hackers to mimic human voices to dupe workers and enter firms’ digital networks, Burke shifted focus from major critical infrastructure to the millions of small and medium-sized firms where he wants to create a “human firewall”.
Training will be expanded for office workers to weed out dodgy emails under the government’s $90 million Horizon 2 project. It will create minimum cybersecurity standard for firms trying to win government contracts.
Burke is warning that a new era of cyber threats could allow one four-week-long incident to wipe $35 billion from the Australian economy, more than 1 per cent of national output. Cyberattacks already cost $25 billion per year, according to the government, and human error is to blame for nearly two-thirds of all successful online attacks.
“We did this for critical infrastructure and the businesses themselves. Now we’ll be expanding this for other businesses that plug into their systems and the supply chain on which they rely,” Burke told this masthead.
“Businesses make investments in firewall technology only to be let down by an innocent mistake by their own employee, who’s been tricked into uploading malicious software. Investing in a technical firewall is not enough. We need to improve the human firewall for real cybersecurity.”
Australia has publicly accused China-backed groups of conducting wide-scale cyber espionage in Australia. Last year, China complained when ASIO boss Mike Burgess called out hacking groups Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon for probing telecommunications networks in Australia and the US, as the superpower uses its digital might to coerce nations and create leverage.
In a blunt speech at the Shangri-la security conference last month, Defence Minister Richard Marles warned that the “seabed is a battlefield” and demanded Beijing be more transparent about its maritime behaviour.
Warning about sea cables being slashed in Europe, Marles said that Taiwan, which is in contest with China, had been reporting more frequent cases of sea cables being severed.
“We are among the most exposed nations in the world to this threat,” Marles warned.
“Around 99 per cent of Australia’s internet traffic flows through just fifteen subsea cables. [They] carry essentially the entirety of our international digital connectivity. Our financial systems, our health systems, our communications, our intelligence partnerships, our ability to operate as a modern economy and a functioning state: all of it is critically dependent on infrastructure that is exposed [and] can be cut with an anchor in the middle of the night.”
Burke’s Horizon 2 announcement includes a commitment to a “preliminary assessment of our subsea cable security posture to prioritise future actions that will strengthen the security and resilience of Australia’s subsea cable infrastructure.”
The government did not provide much detail on the cables commitment, but said it would work with industry players and to protect cables and work to ensure continuous connectivity.
It also promises to expand national exercises to conduct real-world tests.
A fresh security agreement signed between Australia and Microsoft on Wednesday is focused on sub-sea cable security, hyperscale cloud resilience, secure use of artificial intelligence, resilience for small businesses and critical infrastructure.
Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter.
