Australian Ministers Advised to Change Their Computer Passwords

The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) has advised the country's PM Julia Gillard and federal ministers to change their encryption passwords following a breach of Australian Parliament House computers last month.

The compromise affected computers used by ministers during communication with Parliament members and not for official government business.

However, the Herald Sun reports that intelligence officials now fear the infiltration might be more widespread than originally thought.

In addition, sources from the Defence Signals Directorate, the agency in charge of government information security, revealed plans to implement security measures similar to those used by the US Congress.

The compromised parliamentary computers were used by at least ten federal ministers including Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd and Defence Minister Stephen Smith.

The incident came at a time when cyber attacks against government officials around the world have intensified.

The British Foreign Office revealed in February that its employees were targeted in spear phishing attacks with the intention of installing malware on their computers.

During the same month, over 150 French Finance Ministry computers were infected with a trojan that stole information about the upcoming G20 summit.

At around the same time, Canadian authorities revealed that computers were compromised at several government agencies including the Finance Department and the Treasury Board.

More recently, at the end of March, the European Commission and the European External Action Service (EEAS) computer networks were targeted in a cyber attack shortly before a two-day summit where the future structure and economic strategy of the European Union was discussed.

Despite the increase in the number of such reports, some security experts don't believe the frequency of incidents has changed. "International cyber-espionage and criminal theft of information for commercial advantage has been going on for several years now but only really caught the public imagination with the furore surrounding the Aurora attacks in 2009/2010," Trend Micro's director of security research and communication, Rik Ferguson, said.