Herald Sun Article

James Campbell: It’s time we got serious about cyber threats
James Campbell, Herald Sun
May 17, 2017 9:00pm


THE news earlier this month that French President Emmanuel Macron’s election campaign was hacked, allegedly by a group with connections to Russian security agencies, was treated almost as a ho-hum affair.

Last year, when WikiLeaks got hold of several thousand of Hillary Clinton’s campaign emails and published them in the lead-up to November’s election, it was a big deal.
Indeed, some believe the hack was a reason she lost to Donald Trump — only a reason, mind you, not the reason.

French President Emmanuel Macron’s election campaign was hacked.
But this time nobody seemed to take much notice. It’s a depressing thing to say but it appears to be the case that we’re getting used to things like this happening. Of course, when it comes to indifference to state-sponsored global hacking, Australia was an early adopter as it is in so many new technologies.
When back in 2011 The Australian broke the news that the Australian parliament’s computer servers had been hacked by the Chinese Government and several thousand emails copied, the story was big, but not as big it should have been. Three years later, in 2014, we learned the Chinese had actually had the run of the parliamentary computer system for a year, during which time they had almost certainly copied everything on it.
According to someone familiar with the case, the volume of data stolen was so vast it would have taken them years to work through it all.
To give you an idea of the naivety of some our parliamentarians, according to the Australian Financial Review, when the security services briefed the parliamentary committee that oversees these matters, one participant said they were “surprised at the extent of the compromise and did not immediately comprehend why information on personal relationships and domestic politics would have been so useful to the Chinese”.

Some believe the hacking of Hillary Clinton’s emails was part of the reason she lost to Donald Trump.
Luckily, the hacked servers are not used to convey classified information, merely stuff that would no doubt be compromising for plenty of MPs and staff. But nothing illustrates better that Australia’s famous “she’ll be right spirit” is not dead, even in these troubled times, than the fact the news didn’t create a bigger fuss.
In the United States, there would have been congressional hearings. We just shrugged and moved on.
Luckily too for the public reputations of the officials concerned, the information didn’t end up in the hands of the Russians who would in all likelihood have handed the embarrassing stuff over to Ecuador’s London house guest, Julian Assange, probably around the time Tony Abbott threatened to shirtfront Vladimir Putin.
From Australia’s point of view, however, the fact that it was the Chinese who penetrated the system made the consequences much more serious because they are interested in influencing our government in a way the Russians aren’t.

But when it comes to China, there is still a massive naivety among some of our politicians that, according to informed sources I have spoken to, drives our security services nuts. It isn’t just the obvious things either, like their failure to take care with cyber security or even their indifference to the consequences of indulging themselves in the traditional pleasures of the Orient when visiting the People’s Republic — it’s their failure to grasp the complete control the Chinese Government can exert over its citizens not only at home, but abroad.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Picture: AFP
IT came as a shock to one politician of my acquaintance, used to playing Santa to ethnic groups in his portfolio, that the Chinese no longer apply for money because they are already being looked after by their homeland. That’s the carrot. The stick is the threat — implied or otherwise — of what the Chinese Government can do to anyone who still has property in China or, if that doesn’t work, what they can do to their relatives.

It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been here or how successful you are, either. Out of the blue a “request” can come to hire someone the employer knows damn well is keeping an eye on them for the folks back home.

By now you are probably thinking I am paranoid, and maybe I am but, as the saying goes, even paranoids have real enemies. And for what it’s worth, I think that in future years we will look back at this period in our history and wonder how it was that we spent so much time, effort and expense fretting about a few jihadi bogans, who for all their ability to kill and maim, have zero chance of achieving their aims, while at same time almost completely ignoring the growing influence on our politics of a foreign power that wants to turn Australia and every other country in the region into a client state.