PRESS RELEASE: Australia should be prepared for Russia’s Cyber Reaction

The Australian Government has made the decision to punish Russia with sanctions in response to the Russian invasion of the Ukraine.

The Australian government has now issued warning to Australian organisations to protect their systems against possible Russian cyber attacks.

Director of RMIT’s Centre for Cyber Security Research & Innovation Professor Matt Warren said “Russian Cyber Attacks are a form of power projection and will be the way that the Russians will try to punish Australia for our political stance. These attacks will potentially impact all aspects of Australian Society and will test our Australia’s ability to protect against Cyber attacks at this scale”.

The threat to Australia is not just to Australian organisations, but also to all tiers of governments, all Australian organisations and individual Australians. So what form will the Russian Cyber attacks take, there are a number of options:

– Denial of Service attacks – is a cyber-attack in which the attacker seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable by flooding the site with date;
– Web-site Defacement – hacking web pages and replacing with an alternative web page usually with a political message;
– Ransomware – infecting organisations with malware that spreads across the system and locks down the system until a ransom (usually in bitcoin is paid);
– Hacking – stealing information that is either publicly disclosed or sold via the darknet.

The attacks will be undertaken either by parts of the Russian Government, APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) hacking groups acting on behalf of the Russian government or by patriotic hacking groups / militia (as in the 2007 cyber attacks on Estonia).