Stanhopian self-congratulation on IT Security

Nothing to see here. There are lots of automated processes that scan a range of Internet devices, and people who run basic tools to fiind vulnerabilities.

IT security is much larger than simply blocking some basic scans and malicious packets.

I’d expect that bragging about your security simply serves to invite some hacker to have a go at cracking the security. Better to just do the security well and lay low.

What is it with Stanhope lately? ACT government agencies performing basic organisational functions competently is news somehow? eg IT security working properly, ACTION training new employees. What next? Public servants paid? Vendor invoices paid?

I would have thought any domain with a “.gov” in it would as a matter of course be subject to a host of attacks from the Chinese.

As disinformation pointed out, lets hope this isnt a challenge put out there thats gonna see unhealthy attention from those with something to prove.

I had heard around the traps they had a successful intrusion last March anyway.

At the end of the day, I cant see why the “government” (read=council) of a small territory would be of any interest to someone to ‘penetrate’ in the first place.

Doesn’t quite gel with the letter we got from ACT health saying one of their laptops was ‘stolen’ with compromising personal data within. IT security wonderful, physical security of IT….s***house

I wonder how they “calculated” 646,000 cyber attacks. I wonder if a 1 second DDOS attack counts as “1 attempt” or 80 attempts.

Am i surprised? not really.

Government website + static IP + general scanning of the internet = a lot of “attempts”.

I wonder what the point of this PR is? Surely there are better performance indicators to measure an IT service on? How about some information on how much this all cost? How about down time? He must be getting desperate for attention if this is the best he can come up with.

A very astute article a while ago pointed out that anyone who uses the word “cyber” is trying to drum up legitimacy with luddites.
The internet is now full of noise. Vulnerability scanners work randomly across ranges of IP addresses. Anyone in IT security knows that the best crackers aren’t detected anyway. It’s why they’re the best. Script kiddies provide the noise and get the attention. Just pray that the ACT government doesn’t annoy someone that really knows what they’re doing. Mr Stanhope could end up paying for a lot of people’s phone bills, parking tickets or electricity. And that would just be the fun things.

Banks repelled about as many visual attacks of people looking at bank vaults and thought attacks of people thinking the ATM would spontaneously release many thousands of dollars for them.

Most cyber attacks had about as much chance of succeeding as these visual and thought attacks.

Cyber statistics are just sad in the way media and politicians present them.

Is Stanhope, in effect, just saying that every attack that has got through has gone unnoticed?

grundy said :

Just a normal part of being online these days…

I suspect that a lot of these “attacks” are the internet equivalent of you receiving a wrong number or a telemarketer call on your home phone, then reporting it as an attempted house invasion.