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Begin New Search Topic Cybersecurity Publishing Institution Australian Strategic Policy Institute

1. Clean pipes: Should ISPs provide a more secure internet?

Author:
Tom Uren
Publication Date:
07-2020
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Australian Strategic Policy Institute
Abstract:
One of the largest online challenges facing Australia is to provide effective cybersecurity to the majority of internet users who don’t have the skills or resources to defend themselves. This paper explores the concept of ‘Clean Pipes’, which is the idea that internet service providers (ISPs) could provide security services to their customers to deliver a level of default security. The Australian Government looks to be implementing a version of Clean Pipes: on 30 June 2020 the Prime Minister announced a funding commitment to ‘prevent malicious cyber activity from ever reaching millions of Australians across the country by blocking known malicious websites and computer viruses at speed’.1 This paper examines arguments for Clean Pipes and possible implementation roadblocks.
Topic:
Security, Science and Technology, Cybersecurity, and Internet
Political Geography:
Australia

2. Cybercrime in Southeast Asia: Combating a global threat locally

Author:
Jonathan Lusthaus
Publication Date:
05-2020
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Australian Strategic Policy Institute
Abstract:
What’s the problem? Cybercrime is a serious threat facing Australia and the world, but this criminal activity is often wrongly viewed as a near invisible online phenomenon, rather than a ‘real world’ concern. Behind every attack sits one or more people in a physical location. Those people are products of particular socio-economic conditions, which influence the types of regional and local cybercrime activity they specialise in. Cybercrime isn’t evenly distributed around the globe, but is centred around hotspots, which offer potential breeding grounds or safe harbours from where offenders can strike. This is true in Australia’s own region, where some Southeast Asian countries are emerging as bases for serious regional, and even global, cybercrime threats. We’re not proactively tackling the locations where the cybercrime threat develops and matures. What’s the solution? Australia’s current approach to fighting cybercrime needs to be augmented to account more seriously for this local dimension, particularly in Southeast Asia, and our fight against cybercrime should be more targeted, enduring and forward-looking. While it makes sense to support international cooperation in the fight against cybercrime, those efforts need to be targeted to specific hotspots where the problem is the most acute and Australia’s contributions can provide the greatest value for money. This involves the identification of current or future cybercriminal hotspots within Australia’s near region. Australia’s existing law enforcement capacity-building programs should be matched specifically to those countries producing the biggest cybercrime threat. Deeper relationships should also be developed between investigators in Australia and those countries through more cyber liaison posts and exchange programs. Finally, Australia should adopt prevention programs that seek to block offenders’ pathways into cybercrime and promote those programs to suitable cybercrime hotspots in the region.
Topic:
Crime, National Security, Cybersecurity, and Internet
Political Geography:
Australia and Southeast Asia

3. National security agencies and the cloud: An urgent capability issue for Australia

Author:
John Coyne, Michael Shoebridge, and Albert Zhang
Publication Date:
05-2020
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Australian Strategic Policy Institute
Abstract:
This new ASPI report, argues for the development of a national security cloud. If the community doesn’t shift to cloud infrastructure, it’ll cut itself off from the most powerful software and applications available, placing itself in a less capable position using legacy software that vendors no longer support. The report’s authors argue that if this need isn’t addressed rapidly and comprehensively, Australia will quite simply be at a major disadvantage against potential adversaries who are using this effective new technology at scale to advance their own analysis and operational performance. The report identifies four significant obstacles that stand in the way of Australia’s national security community moving to cloud infrastructure. These obstacles need to be crossed, and the change needs to be driven by ministers and agency heads. Ministers and agency heads have both the responsibility and perspective to look beyond the important current technical security standards and rules and think about the capability benefit that cloud computing can bring to Australia’s national security. They’re the ones who must balance opportunity and risk.
Topic:
National Security, Cybersecurity, and Internet
Political Geography:
Australia and Australia/Pacific

4. Weaponised deep fakes

Author:
Hannah Smith and Katherine Mansted
Publication Date:
04-2020
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Australian Strategic Policy Institute
Abstract:
Fakes are all around us. Academic analysis suggests that they’re difficult to spot without new sensors, software or other specialised equipment, with 1 in 5 photos you see being fraudulent. The exposure of deep fakes and the services they facilitate can potentially lead to suppression of information and a general breakdown in confidence in public authorities and trust. We need to react not just to false or compromised claims but to those who would try to exploit them for nefarious purposes. We should not assume the existence of fake news unless we have compelling evidence to the contrary, but when we do, we should not allow the propaganda. I’ve never been more sure of this point than today. —GPT-2 deep learning algorithm The foreword to this report was written by a machine. The machine used a ‘deep fake’ algorithm — a form of artificial intelligence (AI) — to generate text and a headshot. Deep fakes are increasingly realistic and easy to create. The foreword took us approximately five minutes to generate, using free, open-source software.1
Topic:
National Security, Science and Technology, Cybersecurity, Internet, and Emerging Technology
Political Geography:
Australia and Australia/Pacific

5. Australia's next cybersecurity strategy: Views from The Strategist

Author:
Fergus Hanson, Gai Brodtmann, Rachael Falk, Nigel Phair, Lesley Seebeck, and Peter A. Dutton
Publication Date:
02-2020
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Australian Strategic Policy Institute
Abstract:
Back in 2016, Australia launched a new national cybersecurity strategy. The strategy covers a four-year period to 2020, and given the changes in the security environment, an update is now clearly warranted. To that end, the government has just released a discussion paper to kick off the public consultation. The closing date for submissions on the discussion paper is 1 November. To complement the public submission process, ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre is initiating a public debate on what should be included in the next cybersecurity strategy. Contributions will be compiled into a report that we will deliver to the Department of Home Affairs to inform the strategy’s development. This Strategic Insight includes views from The Strategist published in late 2019.
Topic:
Development, Government, Science and Technology, and Cybersecurity
Political Geography:
Australia and Australia/Pacific

6. Mapping more of China's tech giants: AI and surveillance

Author:
Danielle Cave, Fergus Ryan, and Vicky Xiuzhong Xu
Publication Date:
11-2019
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Australian Strategic Policy Institute
Abstract:
ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre has updated the public database that maps the global expansion of key Chinese technology companies. This update adds a further 11 companies and organisations: iFlytek, Megvii, ByteDance (which owns TikTok), SenseTime, YITU, CloudWalk, DJI, Meiya Pico, Dahua, Uniview and BeiDou. Our public database now maps 23 companies and organisations and is visualised through our interactive website, Mapping China’s Technology Giants. The website seeks to give policymakers, academics, journalists, government officials and other interested readers a more holistic picture of the increasingly global reach of China’s tech giants. The response to phase 1 of this project—it quickly became one of ASPI’s most read products—suggests that the current lack of transparency about some of these companies’ operations and governance arrangements has created a gap this database is helping to fill. This update adds companies working mainly in the artificial intelligence (AI) and surveillance tech sectors. SenseTime, for example, is one of the world’s most valuable AI start-ups. iFlytek is a partially state-owned speech recognition company. Meiya Pico is a digital forensics and security company that created media headlines in 2019 because of its monitoring mobile app MFSocket.1 In addition, we’ve added DJI, which specialises in drone technologies, and BeiDou, which isn’t a company but the Chinese Government’s satellite navigation system. We also added ByteDance—an internet technology company perhaps best known internationally for its video app, TikTok, which is popular with teenagers around the world. TikTok is also attracting public and media scrutiny in the US over national security implications, the use of US citizens’ data and allegations of censorship, including shadow banning (the down-ranking of particular topics via the app’s algorithm so users don’t see certain topics in their feed). Company overviews now include a summary of their activities in Xinjiang.2 For some companies, including ByteDance and Huawei, we are including evidence of their work in Xinjiang that has not being reported publicly before. For most of these companies, the surveillance technologies and techniques being rolled out abroad—often funded by loans from the Export–Import Bank of China (China Eximbank)3—have long been used on Chinese citizens, and especially on the Uyghur and other minority populations in Xinjiang, where an estimated 1.5 million people are being arbitrarily held in detention centres.4 Some of these companies have actively and repeatedly obscured their work in Xinjiang, including in hearings with foreign parliamentary committees. This project now includes evidence and analysis of those activities in order to foster greater transparency about their engagement in human rights abuses or ethically questionable activities in the same way Western firms are held to account by Western media and civil society actors, as they should be. In this report, we include a number of case studies in which we delve deeper into parts of the dataset. This includes case studies on TikTok as a vector for censorship and surveillance, BeiDou’s satellite and space race and CloudWalk’s various AI, biometric data and facial recognition partnerships with the Zimbabwean Government. We also include a case study on Meiya Pico’s work with China’s Public Security Ministry on Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) aid projects in Southeast Asia and Central Asia. Those projects include the construction of digital forensics labs and cyber capacity training, including for police forces across Asia. We have also investigated the role that foreign investment plays in the global expansion of some of these companies, particularly in China’s surveillance and public security sector.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Cybersecurity, Surveillance, Artificial Intelligence, and Emerging Technology
Political Geography:
China and Asia-Pacific

7. Engineering global consent: The Chinese Communist Party's data-driven power expansion

Author:
Samantha Hoffman
Publication Date:
10-2019
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Australian Strategic Policy Institute
Abstract:
The Chinese party-state engages in data collection on a massive scale as a means of generating information to enhance state security—and, crucially, the political security of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—across multiple domains. The party-state intends to shape, manage and control its global operating environment so that public sentiment is favourable to its own interests. The party’s interests are prioritised over simply the Chinese state’s interests or simply the Chinese people’s interests. The effort requires continuous expansion of the party’s power overseas because, according to its own articulation of its threat perceptions, external risks to its power are just as likely—if not more likely—to emerge from outside the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) borders as from within. This report explains how the party-state’s tech-enhanced authoritarianism is expanding globally. The effort doesn’t always involve distinctly coercive and overtly invasive technology, such as surveillance cameras. In fact, it often relies on technologies that provide useful services. Those services are designed to bring efficiency to everyday governance and convenience to everyday life. The problem is that it’s not only the customer deploying these technologies—notably those associated with ‘smart cities’, such as ‘internet of things’ (IoT) devices—that derives benefit from their use. Whoever has the opportunity to access the data a product generates and collects can derive value from the data. How the data is processed, and then used, depends on the intent of the actor processing it.
Topic:
Authoritarianism, Cybersecurity, Artificial Intelligence, and Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
Political Geography:
China, Asia, and Australia/Pacific

8. Mapping conditions in Rakhine State

Author:
Elise Thomas, Nathan Ruser, and Mali Walker
Publication Date:
07-2019
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Australian Strategic Policy Institute
Abstract:
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute's International Cyber Policy Centre has combined open-source data with the collection and analysis of new satellite imagery to assess the current status of settlements in northern Rakhine State, Myanmar, which were burned, damaged or destroyed in 2017. As part of this research project, we have also mapped potential repatriation camps and military bases constructed on the sites of former Rohingya settlements. Our research does not support assertions that conditions are in place to support a safe, dignified and sustainable return of Rohingya refugees to Rakhine State. Satellite analysis shows minimal preparation for a return of half a million refugees. The preparations that are being made raise significant concerns about the conditions under which returning Rohingya would be expected to live. Ongoing violence, instability, disruptions to internet and communications technologies and the lack of information about the security situation in Rakhine add to those concerns. This research seeks to add to the evidence base available to policymakers and relevant stakeholders about conditions in northern Rakhine, and Rakhine State more broadly. It also seeks to contribute to informed discussions about the best path towards a safe, dignified and sustainable future for the Rohingya refugees.
Topic:
Cybersecurity, Refugees, Ethnic Cleansing, and Mapping
Political Geography:
Asia, Southeast Asia, and Myanmar