Parliament hack could be ‘grey zone’ attack

Cyber authorities still searching for cause of outage that left politicians and staff unable to use their emails.

The parliamentary incident coincided with a major cyber attack on the Nine media company which threw its weekend broadcasting into chaos.

Assistant Defence Minister Andrew Hastie has raised the possibility that a crippling IT disruption at parliament could be the result of a malicious “grey zone” attack.

The nation’s cyber authorities are working to establish the cause of the outage that left the MPs and staff unable to use their emails since the weekend.

The Department of Parliamentary Services began unlocking the accounts of MPs and staff on Monday, saying full access to emails and calendars and contacts would be progressively reintroduced.

“Support teams are continuing to investigate with urgency,” MPs were told by text message.

The incident coincided with a major cyber attack on the Nine media company which threw its weekend broadcasting into chaos and forced staff to work from home.

Mr Hastie said the issue was related to an external service provider.

“Once the issue was detected, the connection to government systems was cut immediately as a precaution,” he said.

Asked whether the parliament and Nine incidents could have been co-ordinated, Mr Hastie said the nation was “sitting in the midst of great change” in the type of threats it faced.

“We‘re seeing militaries modernise, we’re seeing greater competition,” he told radio station 3AW.

“But we‘re also seeing what we call grey zone tactics, and that is coercive activity below the threshold of conventional war – and cyber is such a tactic, it’s part of the grey zone tactics that we talk about.

‘Cyber as a battlefield’

“And so we need to start thinking about cyber as a battlefield,” he told radio station 3AW.

Mr Hastie said there were “a range of hostile actors” who could be responsible, and the government would not name the perpetrators “unless it‘s clear and in the national interest”.

“We are seeing criminals from one end, to state actors at the other end, looking to undermine Australian individuals, businesses, our parliament, you name it,” he said.

“Cyber is low cost. It‘s hard to attribute when someone conducts a cyber attack. And you can do it anytime, anywhere.

“So, yes, we need to start thinking about cyber as that battlefield. Our whole economy now is running off the internet and that makes us very vulnerable.”

The Australian Cyber Security Centre said it was aware of the disruptions to Department of Parliamentary Services-issued smart phones and tablets, and was providing advice on dealing with the outage.

The computer giant Acer was also hit earlier this month with a $50 million ransomware attack.

Opposition cyber security spokesman Tim Watts said there remained “a lot of unanswered questions” on the parliamentary systems outage.

Labor would seek a full briefing on the incident, he said.