Australian shipbuilder and defence contractor Austal last month had a breach of its systems and a subsequent extortion attempt.
The perpetrators have not been identified but sources say the attack emanated from the Middle East. The ABC reported that, according to the Australian Cyber Security Centre, an Iranian group was most likely responsible.
While Australia has yet to be targeted by more substantial Iranian cyber-attacks against infrastructure and financial institutions, like the US or Saudi Arabia, it has been the victim of several “independent” hacking groups that operate as fronts for the cybercrime of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and intelligence agencies.
One of these Iranian front groups, known as Cobalt Dickens, was reported recently to be behind attempts to hack into Australian universities and databases to steal secret research as part of a global operation targeting universities in almost every Australian city. According to Alex Tilley, a senior researcher at cybersecurity firm SecureWorks, the pattern fits attacks by Cobalt Dickens.
A similar and far more expansive operation by the Mabna Institute, an IRGC front for stealing academic credentials and research, targeted up to 26 Australian universities between 2013 and last year. The US charged nine Iranians involved in the operation, claiming they stole more than 31 terabytes of data from about 150 universities and dozens of companies and government agencies in the US, and login credentials for thousands of academics from more than 300 academic institutions across 22 countries. The stolen data is valued in the billions of dollars.
Read the article by Oved Lobel in The Australian.