Australia’s PM says major political parties hacked in “sophisticated attack”

A cyber-attack on Australian lawmakers that breached the networks of major political parties was probably carried out by a foreign government, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Monday.

As Australia heads for an election due by May, lawmakers were told this month to urgently change their passwords after the cyber intelligence agency detected an attack on the national parliament’s computer network.

Morrison told Parliament on Monday that while investigating the parliamentary hack, cybersecurity authorities "also became aware that the networks of some political parties, Liberal, Labor, and Nationals, have also been affected".

Security agencies "acted decisively to confront it", Morrison said.

"Our cyber experts believe that a sophisticated state actor is responsible for this malicious activity."

Only four nations are thought to be capable of such a high-level attack: China, Russia, Israel, and the United States.

Morrison did not reveal what information was accessed, but he said there was no evidence of election interference.

Investors are still securing local networks, said Alastair MacGibbon, head of the Australian Cyber Security Centre, the government department responsible for online security.

“Our political institutions represent high-value targets,” MacGibbon told reporters in the capital, Canberra.

“We will continue to work with our friends and colleagues, both here and overseas, to work out who is behind it and hopefully their intent.”

The theft of any party or political material has echoes of the 2016 election interference campaign against the United States by Russia. The Democratic National Committee was hacked by Russia and damaging information was released during the presidential campaign.

The attack occurred just a few months before an election in May, raising fears that any theft of MPs’ and staffers’ private correspondence could be used for the purposes of election interference.

The Department of Parliamentary Services, which runs the parliamentary computer network used by MPs and their staff, has significantly upgraded its cybersecurity since the system was breached in 2011, reportedly by Chinese intelligence agencies. In that breach, Chinese agents are understood to have potentially been reading MPs’ emails for months.