Yahoo Finance Massive Chinese hack hits Australian businesses
The Australian government has revealed China’s global cyberattacks have claimed local victims.
The revelation comes after two Chinese nationals were charged in the US overnight for hacking on behalf of China’s Ministry of State Security.
The accused are members of a hacking group known as APT10, which targeted western managed service providers — companies that provide technology services and hold data for corporate clients — that serviced Australian businesses.
Australia’s national cyber security adviser Alastair MacGibbon, in an interview with the ABC, would not name the Australian clients who had been victims of the intellectual property theft but said the hack gave China an unfair advantage.
“That essentially takes food from the people of Australia,” he said.
“It helps them compete in a way that we can’t.”
Global technology giants IBM and SAP were among the many managed service providers that had been hacked, according to Fairfax Media. Just those two providers alone would be holding intellectual property for thousands of Australian clients.
This is the first time the Australian government has explicitly named China for cyberattacks and data theft.
“This is incredibly significant, we’ve never done this before… The language that we’re using, we feel, represents how strongly we feel about this, which is incredibly strong,” Australia’s ambassador for cyber affairs Tobias Feakin told ABC Radio.
“As an international community, as Australia, we are now far more robust in the way that we will ‘name and shame’, and we will shine a light on activities that we think are unacceptable.”
Minister for foreign affairs Marise Payne and minister for home affairs Peter Dutton released a joint statement to condemn the activities of APT10 and called on China to meet its past promises to step intellectual theft.
“Australia calls on all countries – including China – to uphold commitments to refrain from cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property, trade secrets and confidential business information with the intent of obtaining a competitive advantage. These commitments were agreed by G20 Leaders in 2015. Australia and China reaffirmed them bilaterally in 2017,” the ministers said.
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