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China, Russia Try To Hack Australia's Upcoming Submarine Plans
An anonymous reader writes: Chinese and Russian spies have attempted to hack into the top secret details of Australia's future submarines (paywalled), with both Beijing and Moscow believed to have mounted repeated cyber attacks in recent months. One of the companies working on a bid for Australia's new submarine project said it records between 30 and 40 cyberattacks per night.
Nice ad for a subscription, and another link being a brief blurb. Journalism at its best.
Foreign intelligence agencies trying to learn the specifics of a new military system? I am shocked, shocked!
The only news here is that there are signs of it, and seemingly attributable ones as well.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Why do they have this kind of stuff where it can be reached from the internet? I don't see why that's necessary. If it's convenient for the designers then it's too damn convenient for your enemies.
If China/Russia are actively hacking the joint, I must be running something really interesting because I get about 2000/night from Russia and China on my web servers. This is just some scaremongering from a company that has no IT or an IT without a clue.
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Back in my sat technology days, that would be an average night. It went on like that for years.
Its only news if they break in.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
I see absolutely nothing wrong with this. This is exactly what intelligence agencies should be doing - investigating rival countries' military capabilities and assessing threats to the nation.
Meanwhile, what intelligence agencies most definitely shouldn't be doing is mass surveillance of their own people. Intelligence agencies don't exist to suppress descenting opinions. They don't exist to erode freedom. They don't exist to keep the populous inline. The reason they exist to assess external threats to the nation.
It's a sad state of affairs when China and Russia are setting an example to western agencies on how they should be acting.
When you steal plans for a multi-billion dollar project, how do you know when you've got the real plans, and when you've got decoy plans that were carefully developed to be plausible, yet incorrect?
My home NAS records more cyberattacks than that every night, all you need is a computer and and IP adress.
China attacks random IP addresses more than that. Try it for yourself: register a domain, put up a web site, and see how many attempts are made every day, probably in the hundreds.
The country was founded by convicts and houses the most poisonous animals on the planet. I bet they put some of that stuff into their submarine technology.
I wonder, what these numbers mean because I — without doing any classified research whatsoever — get log-entries like these every day:
Do I get to count each entry as a separate attack? Or one "attack" per remote IP?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Chinese and Russian spies have attempted to hack into the top secret details of Australia's future submarines (paywalled)
They couldn't even get through a simple paywall.
Isn't the job of an intelligence agency to collect intelligence?
There's no real data on server named secretsubplans.oz .
Isn't the job of an intelligence agency to collect intelligence?
I think the Russians and Chinese would be negligent if they *didn't* try to get this information.
Meh - everyone has a submarine these days. . .
Even rebel separatist groups. Here in the Philippines the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) sadly have trouble with the Google ranking due to competition in the namespace for that acronym. However, that didn't stop plans for the purchase of a Swede-made MSM Type A midget submarine, which was to be used to disrupt the development of an oil and gas project in the now hotly disputed South-china Sea.
The MILFs are one of several separatist groups in the Philippines, which come in Islamic and Communist, and just-plain-thug varieties. The formation of the of the MILF is actually, unsurprisingly, a tragic story. In the 60s with the incumbent government of the Philippines, proceed with plans to invade and reunite neighboring Sabah, which was granted under a lease, but somehow after World War 2 ended up as Malaysian territory.
Troops from the western region of Mindanao were selected and trained to form an elite squadron. When the troops learned that their mission would involve lethal combat with their neighboring kin-folks they refused to participate, so they were massacred by the Philippines Armed Forces on March 18, 1968. This led to years of uprising and political unrest, and it was only recently that the Philippines Government formally acknowledged that the incident occurred.
Reading about this and other affairs helped me to learn about governments, terrorism, political intrigue and rebel groups. We live in a violent world where democracy and other formal government processes seem to be a thin, fragile structure over game-of-thrones style chaos.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
Chinese and Russian spies have attempted to hack into the top secret details of Australia’s future submarines, with both Beijing and Moscow believed to have mounted repeated cyber attacks in recent months.
The hacking attempts have been aimed at the submarine builders in Germany, France and Japan bidding for the $20 billion contract to build the new fleet. The bidders are holding highly sensitive information about the Royal Australian Navy’s technical requirements for its new-generation submarines.
The hacking attacks have forced the bidders to rely more heavily on hand deliveries of the most sensitive information. And they are understood to have alarmed the federal government, which has raised the issue of cyber security with each of the three foreign bidders for the submarine contract: German shipbuilder ThyssenKrupp, France’s DCNS and the Japanese government.
Manfred Klein, campaign manager Australia for Germany’s TKMS, said at the company’s submarine shipyard in the German port of Kiel: “We have about 30 to 40 (hacking) attempts per night, that’s what our IT people say.”
MORE: New security plan needed
Mr Klein said the cyber attacks were all directed at the submarine facility in Kiel and came at a time when the shipyard had a team of 120 people finalising its design for the future Australian submarine.
“The Australian government has raised it with us, and they think it’s significant,” said TKMS Australia board member Jim Duncan, who is helping put together the German bid.
TKMS Australia chairman John White said the attempted industrial espionage was to be expected on such a sensitive and important defence project. “They’re trying to get into everyone’s communications,” Dr White said. “Espionage and breaches of security ... you just assume it is happening. Everybody is in that game. It’s a space that people play in. We don’t suspect anyone, we suspect everybody.”
The Australian understands Japan and France are concerned about attempts by suspected foreign powers to hack into information relating to the subs project.
TKMS declined to say which countries were behind the attempted hackings, but all three foreign bidders privately believe China is leading the push to glean information about the submarine project. Other strategic rivals, including Russia, are also suspected of recent hacking attempts and it is also possible the three bidders for the lucrative contract are seeking to spy on each other.
There is no evidence to suggest that any classified information has so far been compromised by the attempted hacks, which are thought to be from state-run intelligence agencies, commercial companies and individuals.
Cabinet minister Simon Birmingham today said any reports of security threats to Australia were “always of concern” to the government and “every possible precaution” would be taken to protect sensitive information.
“There is always a lot of foreign interest in matters such as technology that goes into submarines or the like,” Senator Birmingham said on Sky News.
“That’s why we invest a lot in the security of information, that’s why we make sure that our security services are well equipped and why we have protocols in terms of the handling of information throughout government.
“I’m sure that these matters will be looked into just as of course any other security threats are and that every possible precaution is taken to protect the sensitivity of information that is critical to Australia’s national security interests.”
The espionage comes at a time of growing strategic naval competition in the Asia-Pacific, with China ramping up its submarine building program and asserting its territorial claims on disputed islands in the South China Sea. Russia has also stepped up naval activities in the region, while other Southeast Asia
Well of course the top secret details will be behind a paywall. How else are they supposed to keep them secret?
I guess these are the same spies that are trying to hack into my website every night! I guess they're lucky they're only getting Chinese and Russian ones!
Seriously though, three news articles are linked to in this story and zero of them have any more information that differentiates this even remotely from the standard brute force hacking attempts that I'm sure everyone that reads Slashdot puts up with on a daily basis on their various servers and systems.
As far as I can tell for anyone in IT here in Australia, there's no way to distinguish this from an actual threat from foreign nation states attempting to CYBER-espionage us, and just the typical random background noise of automated exploit scriptkiddie stuff.
Any real tech journos want to try to get some actual information?
DoD work is supposed to be air gaped when classified. Sure, there is a difference between military contractors and Government. Guess which ones give up information? Not the guys building the military gear, because they are held accountable for their actions.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
It's not easy but you can get activation codes for MS products that are valid for 6-24 months or you can use a CAC card to authenticate. Then you distribute via DVD-ROM any updates. That's how you keep the system up and running, see it all the time.
Now, the CAD or other design software might be different, I'd have to know that in order to see if I can purchase a version of the software that doesn't require external authentication.
So, really, a lot of the software is almost like Shareware where it works and then times out. And, no, changing the date/time doesn't restart the clock.
Could have thrown in the plans for the secret moon base for free....
So they want to cheat their way past security. And? One of them has about 143 million people and a despot running the show (he's actually in charge of the criminal organization all kickbacks roll to). And there is a full department of eager hackers. China on the other hand is trying to build itself some islands in the South China Sea, and then claim territory and territorial islands around it. And likewise claim fishing, oil, and everything and anything else it can get its hands on. And they have 1.1 billion people, and if 1 in 1000 is an engineer, and 1 in 10 engineers is a *really good* engineer. And 1 in 6 is a software engineer, then you get about 18,333 really good software engineers in the country. And if only 1 in 10 is patriotic, then you get about 1833 really good patriotic software engineers. And thats enough to get 30-40 hacks per night on an Australian firm trying to build a new submarine.
I get 30 to 40 attempts an hour, and that's just the ssh attempts.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
http://science.slashdot.org/st...
The 30 to 40 a night are background noise to evaluate how the recipients respond to "attacks". If the recipient responds, then the attack changes, and basically they just want to know who is watching, what their security skill is, and to determine what kinds of attack might be successful.
Meanwhile, the real attacks are occurring at a lower level, may be rerouted through other locations, and cause so few packets to traverse the firewall, they are rarely considered attacks.
But those are the ones to watch and fear.
Usually you don't stop those attacks - You run a filter on every remote access packet through the day and work out they occurred later on - but at least you can clean up the mess then.
Just as well that paywall was there to stop the hackers
dont count sheep, count cyberattacks
one cyberattack
two cyberattack
feeling sleepy already
What kind of idiot keeps his secret 'Submarine Plans' on a computer connected to the Internet.
> Chinese and Russian spies have attempted to hack into the top secret details of Australia's future submarines (paywalled)...
If the secret details are paywalled why those stupid spies didn't simply pay to access them? Budget cuts?
Well, I've got to get back to work. When I stop rowing, the slave ship just goes in circles.
:-) This amount of attacks simply means that they don't care. I am working on one website of known Japanese corporation and this is the log from my IDS - how many attacks were detected/prevented a day - on average between 100 - 200... and that is just one commercial company: ....
105x 2015-11-02
122x 2015-11-03
226x 2015-11-04
108x 2015-11-05
125x 2015-11-06
149x 2015-11-07
107x 2015-11-08
231x 2015-11-09
40x 2015-11-10
Statistics by attacker's country:
27.5% CN
14.8% US
5.8% IN
5.1% RU
3.8% BR
3.5% KR
2.2% NL
1.8% FR
1.8% DE
1.7% GB
I guess that it is because we don't use paywall as Australian government to protect our customer. That is why we see such high rate of hacking attempts. :-D
BTW This PR statistics means really nothing when we all know that it takes just 1 successful hack...
Well, I've got to get back to work. When I stop rowing, the slave ship just goes in circles.