The Covid-19 pandemic has changed the way we think about national resilience in the face of global crises. It’s shown us, brutally, how such disasters can cascade around an interconnected, interdependent world. It also invites us to question what other potential shocks we might be vulnerable to as a nation.
In this new world, Australia should be thinking hard about its national cyber resilience. We can’t predict the future, but we often have forewarnings. We might not know the where or the when of the next crisis, but we often have a good idea of the what. In the past 100 years, Covid-19 was preceded by the Spanish flu, MERS, SARS, H1N1 and Ebola. We had seen enough to know the potential risk.
The next global cyber crisis will have been preceded by NotPetya and WannaCry. In 2017, the NotPetya malware, designed to propagate rapidly and automatically, began corrupting computer systems across the world. It happened swiftly and indiscriminately in a way that now seems analogous to the coronavirus pandemic.
When the NotPetya wiper was first unleashed by the Russian government on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, the malware crippled hospitals, airports, banks, the power grid and almost every government department. In an interconnected world, it quickly spread globally and ultimately caused damage that cost US$10 billion. The crippling of a major logistics company, Maersk, meant that one-fifth of the world’s shipping was affected.
Only a month before, the North Korean government released the WannaCry worm as a way of raising much-needed hard currency through cybercrime, in this ..
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