Cyber Attack on Central Bank of Australia

Cyber Attack on Reserve Bank of Australia

The Central Bank of Australia has admitted that it has been the victim of a cyber attack, as some hackers targeted it for reasons best known to them. A report on this had been published on a popular Australian Daily Newspaper, and soon after the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) said that it had been targeted by some hacker group as a part of a cyber attack.

The Australian newspaper report also revealed that this hacking incident is nothing new for the Central Bank of Australia. The hacking incident caused severe problems to the central bank, and it eventually included malwares embedded in various emails.

The Central Bank said that the hackers had not able to make the system corrupted, so no data had been lost, and all of its system worked perfectly well during the time of attack. The reports clearly mentioned that the attack had been originated in China, but the Central Bank of Australia did not comment in that issue, as it was quite a sensitive one for sure.

It is not a new thing for China, as it has already been blamed for this type of hacking or cyber attacks on a frequent manner. According to the reports these attacks mainly target business, economic and financial information of some leading countries. Even the United States (US) are also suffering from these type of cyber attacks, as the US is the one of the latest victims of cyber attacks.

The Reserve Bank of Australia has issued a statement on that issue. Below is the excerpt of what the RBA said in its statement,

"The bank has comprehensive security arrangements in place which have isolated these attacks and ensured that viruses have not been spread across the Bank's network or systems. At no point have these attacks caused the Bank's data or information to be lost or its systems to be corrupted."

The Australian Financial Review investigated the whole matter, and according to the investigation, one of these series of the hacker attack involved a malware-attached email, which was entitled as "Strategic Planning FY2012". That email had been sent to several members of staff of the Central Bank of Australia. Some of the staffs eventually opened that mail, and because of that the malware injected into the bank’s server, and caused the overall incident.

Basically that mail contained an application, and that malware application had been able to bypass some of the existing security measures of the Australia’s Central Bank, but luckily it failed to go through the computer system, so that it was not able to corrupt the system, and the bank didn’t lost any of its crucial data.

According to a source the attack had also tried to steal the information regarding to the upcoming G20 meetings. As I have already mentioned that the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) did not comment on the allegation that the malware eventually originated and came from China.

This has to be mentioned here that the New Government of China has denied the entire allegation. It repeatedly said that the China is not the behind of all these recent cyber attacks on various countries. Various experts around the world are saying that these malware or cyber attacks mainly target the valuable and sensitive commercial and governmental information.

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