Australian intelligence is projecting that foreign nations will increasingly attempt to sabotage its country’s critical infrastructure.
On Feb. 19, Mike Burgess, director-general of security in charge of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), delivered an annual threat assessment encompassing the many national security threats facing Australia. Among the most important, he noted, are the ways in which foreign threat actors are weaponizing artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled disinformation and deepfakes, military espionage, and attacks against critical infrastructure that could cause damage to the military, government, and social cohesion.
“ASIO’s report reflects an increasingly combative international relations environment, increasing competition between great powers, and Australia’s position in all of this — one which is both strategically critical and geographically fragile,” Bugcrowd founder Casey Ellis says. “Critical infrastructure is the primary target [of nation-states] in the cyber domain. Eleven percent of cybersecurity incidents in the past year in Australia have focused on critical infrastructure, with mounting evidence of adversaries positioning themselves for opportunistic strikes in a way that mirrors tactics observed targeting the US.”
Threats to Australia’s Military and Civilians
Burgess has now made six threat assessments since taking office in 2019, but none quite like his latest. “I think it’s fair to say it’s the most significant, serious, and sober address so far,” he said on Wednesday.
Of the cyber threats to the country, Burgess highlighted a few primary areas of concern.
First, the power that AI gives to malicious governments and criminal threat actors. “Artificial intelligence will enable disinformation and deepfakes that can promote false narratives, undermine factual information, and erode trust in institutions,” he explained. “Espionage and foreign interference will be enabled by advances in technology, particularly artificial intelligence and deeper online pools of personal data vulnerable to collection, exploitation, and analysis by foreign intelligence services.”
AI has been a source of increasing concern around data collection for years. Major Silicon Valley companies have had no reticence in training their models on unauthorized data around the Web, a practice made even more worrying now that the latest chatbot comes from an authoritarian state.
Burgess also spoke of “greater threats” against Australia’s military. “Defence personnel are being targeted in person and online. Some were recently given gifts by international counterparts. The presents contained concealed surveillance devices,” he said. He went on to describe the trilateral security partnership between Australia, the UK, and the US (AUKUS) as “a priority target for intelligence collection, including by countries we consider friendly. ASIO has identified foreign services seeking to target AUKUS to position themselves to collect on the capabilities, how Australia intends to use them, and to undermine the confidence of our allies.”
Foreign Nations Eye AUS Critical Infrastructure
ASIO also assessed that “authoritarian regimes are growing more willing to disrupt or destroy critical infrastructure to impede decision-making, damage war-fighting capabilities, and sow social discord.”
Burgess pointed to Russia’s war in Ukraine as an obvious case study in how governments can sabotage critical infrastructure to cause both physical and cyber consequences. And it’s not like the threat to Australia’s infrastructure is merely theoretical, either.
“Cyber units from at least one nation state routinely try to explore and exploit Australia’s critical infrastructure networks, almost certainly mapping systems so they can lay down malware or maintain access in the future,” Burgess said. “We recently discovered one of those units targeting critical networks in the US. ASIO worked closely with our American counterpart to evict the hackers and shut down their global accesses, including nodes here in Australia.”
Even in times without war, he warned, “foreign regimes are expected to become more determined to, and more capable of, pre-positioning cyber access vectors they can exploit in the future.”