New Zealand is a target for state-sponsored cyberattacks, according to the government’s National Cyber Security Centre. Official data indicates that as many as 38% of the 339 hacks that it responded to since 30 June 2018 were state-sponsored in origin.
The NCSC reported that the number of attacks detected in 2019 has been similar to 2018 – with one key difference. The attacks this year have had a larger impact, because in a greater proportion of cases, cybersecurity teams could not identify these security breaches until it was too late. Such incidents made up 17% of the NCSC’s records in 2019 – and are referred to as “post-compromise” cases, as the damage had already been done by the time they were detected.
Attacks that occurred in the previous year were more likely to be detected in time, giving administrators the ability to mitigate the negative impacts that would otherwise have resulted. Such “pre-compromise” cases make up the majority of known cyberattacks in New Zealand.
It is worth highlighting that the 339 attacks addressed by the NCSC represented only a small proportion of the total number of cybersecurity incidents that have impacted the nation this year. The NCSC is tasked with concentrating on high-impact events and nationally significant organisations, meaning that most cyberattacks tend to go under its radar.
The NCSC also maintains a cyberthreat detection system known as CORTEX, which it uses to warn New Zealand’s critical infrastructure providers of imminent danger. Yet other threats must also be dealt with, and the organisation says that it receives an average of 16 new incident reports per month which CORTEX does not detect.
The NCSC states that in many cases, security breaches come about due to a failure to apply software patches and multi-factor authentication.