Page 43 - Australian Defence Magazine May 2019

erations disrupt, degrade and deny offshore adversaries who pose serious threats to Aus- tralia’s national interests,” Burgess said.
MAJGEN Thompson is also keen to point out that the links between the various government players remain strong.
“We’ve got a well structured ecosystem from an ADF perspective where we work elsewhere within the Department of De- fence, particularly with the CIO Group on the defensive side, and of course the ADF has an incredibly tight relationship with the ASD,” MAJGEN Thompson said. “It’s been that way for 70 years and it has not changed at all with the movement of ASD to its statutory independence in July last year. That relation- ship remains incredibly close. You wouldn’t be able to get a cigarette paper between us.”
Workforce
Both MAJGEN Thompson and Burgess are open about the fact that they are in the market for people, but they are ‘not the ste- reotypes you see in the movies’.
“The ADF people who are in ASD sup- porting and contributing to the ASD mis- sion, they’re fantastic young men and wom- en - well trained, professional, supporting that ASD mission in the role of cyber opera- tions, the cyber security functions, and the nesting with the broad electronic warfare or the traditional electronic warfare func- tion has generated a delightful career path for someone who’s interested in a career in military cyber,” MAJGEN Thompson said.
“They come from all sorts of backgrounds - everything from computer science to mar- keting, international relations, the law, lin- guistics, biology and mathematics to name a few,” Burgess reflected in his Lowy speech. “Regardless of the background – all of them go through a comprehensive training pro- gram to make sure they have what it takes to be an offensive cyber operator. Some of them are expert at generating technical ef- fects to degrade or destroy an adversary’s communication device.
“It’s the type of effect that might be crucial to support a military operation. Working alongside the operators are our software de- velopers. These programmers are responsible for developing highly surgical software tools to cause the effect. It is precision work, requir- ing reverse engineering skills and a deep un- derstanding of computer operating systems.
“They have to find a way to bypass the tar- get’s security mechanisms, and make sure the tool causes the exact effect that has been approved under our legal framework– and only that effect.”
The ADF is also ensuring that they will be able to field the next generation of cyber war- riors from within their own ranks. At this point, MAJGEN Thompson has not had to look outside the current cadre of ADF per- sonnel but knows that it is on the horizon.
“We’ve got a course running at the mo- ment for 50 members of the ADF. There were 1,000 expressions of interest from across the ADF for places on that course.
“The service chiefs have agreed to con- sider case by case basis waivers to traditional entry standards for cyber experts to come in, both full time and part time “It’s one of those opportunities where the value propo- sition that we can offer to people who want to come in who might already have a career in cyber underway somewhere else but if you want to come and do some of this really funky stuff legally, there’s only two places you can do it and that’s ASD and the ADF,” MAJGEN Thompson said.
The pros and cons of connectivity
Despite the assumption that all IT security people do is say no, the nature of connect- edness is now assumed. And
it’s not just consumers and the
everyday people; it’s business as usual for the ADF now.
“What does that mean? It means that we’ve got to be very aware of what vulnerabilities we’re introducing into the ADF and defend against threats ac- cordingly,” MAJGEN Thomp- son said.
“I often talk about how dur-
ing my lifetime there will be no more old- fashioned hydraulics left in the ADF inven- tory, everything will be fly by wire, sail by wire, drive by wire. For the pedants, I get that that still involves hydraulics but mod- ern hydraulics, the electronically driven. So what does that mean? It means that as soon as that ship pulls alongside, when that air- craft is towed into a hangar, when that ve- hicle pulls into a workshop, that someone is going to plug in an electronic device.
“I’m interested to know what’s the hygiene of that device, who is responsible for check- ing the hygiene of that device, who’s device is it and what are the potential vulnerabili- ties from all this. And that’s just from a basic cyber-worthiness perspective before we get into actually fighting in cyberspace.”
The grey zone
Warfighting in the grey zone, as it is now known, is by definition an amorphous
space. The US has been clear in defining a cyber attack will be treated the same way as a kinetic attack. But should the first shots fired in war be cyber-based, the Australian response is less clear.
“We’re continually grappling with be- cause it’s changing every day,” MAJGEN Thompson said to ADM.
The 1901 Defence Act is very clear about how and when the military can be deployed on home soil. What’s less clear is what role the military plays in the grey zone. For ex- ample, what if Australia was subject to Es- tonian style digital shut down; no access to the internet for over a week. Remember this is the same Internet that runs the vast ma- jority of power, banking, finance, water and other critical services in our nation. Or even a disruption of these services to the point where they were unreliable.
“Whilst we’ve got provisions within Australian legislation to call out or to use the military in times of crisis, this is not an environment where you can metaphor- ically parachute in and immediately iden- tify anomalies and unusual behaviour. It’s
a tough question to work through but I just have a question, in that scenario, if a threat comes at scale, what is the role of the ADF? The ADF capability is designed and built for use offshore.”
“I think just from a pragmatic per- spective, if a threat comes at scale it just doesn’t make sense to me that we would have highly trained soldiers, sailors, air- men and airwomen sitting on the bench while their civilian mates are in the fight,” MAJGEN Thompson said to ADM.
Given the evolving threat and the state and non-state actors in the mix, is this re- ally a hole we can continue peering into? Barriers to entry to a cyber attack are in- credibly low. When does transnational cyber crime cross into an attack on a sov- ereign nation? This is the essence of the grey zone.
At the moment, there are more questions than answers in this space.
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“Our targets may find their
communications don’t work at a critical moment – rather than being destroyed completely.”