14 DAY TRIAL // The Australian Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) reports that the number of attempted intrusions against the country's military networks has more than doubled this year.
The Defence Signals Directorate is Australia's signals intelligence (SIGINT) agency, which also plays an important information security role across government networks.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the new cyber attack data was gathered by DSD's special unit working from the Cyber Security Operations Centre (CSOC), which officially opened at the beginning of this year.
A number of 5,551 intrusion attempts have been recorded between January and August on military networks, which means an average of 700 per month.
Back in January, former Australian Defence Minister John Faulkner announced that last year the country's defence networks were the target of 2,400 electronic security incidents.
The DSD did not reveal where the attacks originated from, but noted that there is evidence of foreign intelligence agencies being responsible for some of them.
''The very nature of the internet makes it difficult to attribute malicious activity to particular sources,'' a DSD spokesman told the Herald.
''[But] it is reasonable to assume that intelligence services of foreign governments would seek to exploit the ubiquity of internet connectivity," they added.
The Department of Defence declined to comment on whether some of these attempts were successful and if any data was stolen, however, it stressed that no operations were disrupted.
It's not clear why the number of attacks has increased so drastically this year, especially since Australia doesn't have one of the most active military forces in the world.
At best, spies might have hoped to obtain secret information shared by the country's close allies like the United States or the United Kingdom.
The U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense recently wrote that over 100 foreign intelligence organizations are trying to hack into the digital networks used by the U.S. military.