In a report on the threat landscape over the past year,global cyber security firm Crowdstrike found China was behind 67 per cent of state-sponsored attacks. Iran was responsible for 7 per cent,North Korea 5 per cent,Russia 1 per cent,while another 20 per cent were suspected state-sponsored attacks,but their source was unknown.
The new findings follow the Australian government’s release of its second annual cyber threat assessment,which revealed reports of cybercrime have jumped by more than 13 per cent – orone incident every 7.8 minutes – over the past year.
Thousands of Australian businesses were this year hit by a majorcyber attack on Microsoft Exchange servers that Australia,the United States and others believe was sponsored by China’s Ministry of State Security. It has been alleged the Chinese government agency paid criminal groups to conduct ransomware attacks to extort millions of dollars from companies.
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Crowdstrike’s chief technology officer Mike Sentonas said the activities of “e-crime” groups and foreign states were now starting to merge.
“The e-crime actors are leveraging a lot of the tradecraft from the nation states,but we’re actually starting to see the nation states use the tradecraft of e-crime actors,” he said. “And a big part of that is to make it harder to detect them.”
Over the past year,cyber attacks against telecommunications and retail more than doubled,professional services saw a more than 90 per cent increase in hacks,while the government and academic sectors experienced an 80 per cent rise.