The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reports that China has been fingered as the source for a very substantial attack on a supercomputer operated by Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology (BoM). The BoM is an analog of the UK’s Met Office and the USA’s National Weather Service. Like those agencies, the BoM provides weather data to all sorts of customers, including defence operations. The ABC’s suggesting that a breach of the BoM is therefore a threat to the nation’s security. The Register is properly paranoid so believes this may be the case, but not because the supercomputer in question sometimes sends some weather feeds to defence agencies. That the super is used for modelling the nation’s climate suggests an economic motive: if an attacker knows what data sets the BoM is crunching, and why, it could prove useful in all sorts of ways.
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ORIGINAL SOURCE: The Register
