Facebook exposes Australia’s vulnerability, says top ex-military man

Australia’s critical systems continue to be hit by more aggressive attacks from Foreign State actors, and one major change needs to be made. 

Exclusive: Facebook’s assault on Australia and revelations a Chinese firm holds our most sensitive data has exposed the nation’s vulnerability and the urgent need to improve sovereign security, Australia’s former Defence information warfare tsar has warned.

Major General Marcus Thompson was until last November the Australian Defence Force’s Information Warfare Division chief, before quitting after 34 years in the military to take his cyber security fight into the mainstream public domain.

He said information security was so central to our existence yet it remained “a fleeting thought” in the national psyche and foreign State actors continued to launch more aggressive assaults on our systems.

Dr Thompson said his priority now was to prioritise national cyber security defence; move Australia’s digital supply chain onshore to protect sovereignty and build our sovereign cyber capability to better support our cyber defences, stimulating national economic growth in the process.

Major General Marcus Thompson. Picture: Supplied

Defence now saw cyber security as the “fifth column” domain now in war after land, sea, sky and space, and the public should also recognise its importance.

“Information warfare is not a new concept, psychological operations, misinformation operations, military deception has been around since biblical times,” he told News Corp Australia.

“But what is new and what we are seeing now is these age old activities in and through this relatively new war fighting domain of cyber space. It is a domain that does not distinguish between military and civilian, it doesn’t distinguish between government and industry and academia and we’ve seen examples all through the Australian economy across all sectors of information warfare of cyber activities being conducted across the economy.”

He said his retirement from Defence to join Macquarie Telecom, an Australian cloud, data centre, government cyber security firm, allowed him to contribute to a national debate on cyber protections.

“Australian sovereign capability is so important to us,” he said.

“We need to be less dependent on foreign entities including those who claim to be our friends. The United States is our friend and long may that be the case and we should celebrate that everyday but as recent events show is Facebook our friend? They took on a democratically-elected government here. I think there is all sorts of questions about digital sovereignty that we need to be debating in this country.”

Macquarie Data Centres’ “data bunker” in Canberra. Picture: Supplied

As revealed by News Corp earlier this year, the nation’s most sensitive data including millions of Australian tax and company files held by the ATO and ASIC and sensitive data from government departments including Defence and Home Affairs were being held by a Chinese firm that from 2016 began buying up parts of the then British owned data storage firm Global Switch.

That firm, Jiangsu Shagang Group, which part owns Australian iron mining giant Grange Resources, is China’s largest privately owned enterprise whose chairman Shen Wenrong had been a deputy for the Congress of the Chinese Communist Party.

Despite a pledge by then Treasurer Scott Morrison that the files would all be moved, the government has struggled to move all its servers to a new home including the Macquarie Telecom $17 million data bunker in Canberra which already supported 40 per cent of Australian Federal and State government agencies and personnel with cyber security, secure internet gateway and cloud services. Global Switch has been retained to hold departmental files under at least 2025.

Originally published as Facebook exposes Australia’s vulnerability, says top ex-military man