The Canberra Times has breathless reporting of the heroic battles the ACT Government’s internet security unit, Shared Services ICT, has been fighting against students in the education system.
Shared Services ICT acting general manager Ken Moore told a budget estimates committee yesterday the service repelled hundreds of thousands of cyber attack attempts every year.
And, Mr Moore said, cyber attacks peaked during holidays.
”We’re not a large target, and it can be seasonal and we do notice that in holiday periods the number of attacks do increase, but so far we’ve been very successful at keeping all the internally-hosted sites [safe].”
Greens MLA Caroline Le Couteur said it was well known that high school students ”have been known to enjoy themselves playing with” the Government’s networks.
”How do you protect against an area of possibly the most threat?” she asked.
Mr Moore replied, ”We work very closely with the Commonwealth Government, in particular the Defence Signals Directorate, ensuring that we have the sufficient safeguards within our network.”
Fortunately they are vigilant and have deployed firewalls and “other measures”.
No mention of what they’re doing to hunt down those trying to inappropriately access their networks rather than remaining a passive target.