Australia blames China for massive cyberattack
Photo credit: The China Project illustration
In February, three months before national elections, the Australian government announced that it had been hit with a massive cyberattack. The network of the Australian national parliament, as well as the networks of three major political parties — the ruling Liberal Party, along with its coalition partner, the National Party, and the opposition Labor Party — had all been breached. The Prime Minister at the time blamed a “sophisticated state actor,” but did not name names.
- A government report in March blamed the Chinese Ministry of State Security for the hacks, Reuters reports.
- But this report was kept secret, reportedly “in order to avoid disrupting trade relations with Beijing.”
- China’s response: “China’s Foreign Ministry denied involvement in any sort of hacking attacks and said the internet was full of theories that were hard to trace.”
The explosive revelations are the latest strain on Australia-China relations, which have taken a turn for the worse since a series of media investigations into Chinese Communist Party influence in the country in 2017, and the passage of laws restricting foreign influence in 2018.
A similar trend may now be starting in New Zealand, where Kiwi website Stuff reported that the Auckland Confucius Institute was “acting as a conduit between the University of Auckland and the Chinese Consulate-General,” which many regarded as highly inappropriate. This comes only weeks after New Zealanders mocked Simon Bridges, the leader of the opposition New Zealand National Party, after he gave a fawning interview to CGTN and rejected the (accurate) characterization of Politburo member Guō Shēngkūn 郭声琨 as “the leader in charge of China’s secret police.”
