(Source: Wikimedia Commons)
The Reserve Bank of New Zealand disclosed Sunday that hackers infiltrated its network after compromising its file-sharing system from Accellion. The nation’s central bank says the attack may have exposed commercial and consumer information, and other Accellion customers also had systems compromised. The breach is contained, but it will take time to determine the impact,” the bank’s governor, Adrian Orr, says in a statement. “The analysis of the potentially affected information is being done with pace and care. We recognize the public interest in this incident. However, we are not in a position to provide further details at this time.
What does a guy from a Northland village know about any of this? Well I’ve been a leadership regular at Washington’s Georgetown University, their top foreign affairs school. I’ve dined with former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and know her narrow world view consisting of the USA, European Union and the Middle East, no mention of China, India or Brazil. I’ve been briefed by Homeland Security in Pentagon Place about the risks of the fuel carrying rail tunnel passing under the Washington seats of government, I’ve attended briefings from the head of their National Intelligence Committee whose answer to the question, “what is the most populous Islamic country” was Saudi Arabia, when it is clearly Indonesia, bringing responses from US attendees telling me not to ask trick questions.
We have traded our liberty for security, writes Damien Grant.
OPINION: American statesman and inventor, Benjamin Franklin, is credited with the most cited quote on the trade-off between liberty and security when, in 1755, he wrote; “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” Franklin’s critique is harsh. He is making a value judgement about those whose preference is to forgo some liberty in return for safety. These people are not just wrong in Franklin’s mind, they do not
deserve liberty or safety. I do not share this disdain for my fellow citizens but it is clear that we have long passed the high-water mark for liberty. Today’s comfortable western citizen does not value liberty nor privacy. What we crave is security and our demand is being satisfied by an expanding surveillance state that few are inclined to question.
The country s spy agency - the GCSB - is all too aware of the threat they pose. We are seeing an increase in sophisticated actors, and the difference between a state-sponsored actor and a criminal actor is getting less, and less stark, says GCSB Director-General Andrew Hampton.
The GCSB was called in to help with 352 major cyber incidents this year - a third of those were launched by foreign states, like China, Russia and Korea, trying to obtain our state secrets and commercially sensitive information.
That would typically be of most concern for our spies, but not anymore. It s not just the state-sponsored actors that we re concerned about, increasingly sophisticated criminal actors seem to have similar capabilities that were previously only available to states, Hampton says.