Parliament House Unprepared For Cyberattack, Investigators Find

Australia’s parliamentarians and Parliament house officials only have themselves to blame for the major cyberattack that breached the parliamentary network in February last year, an investigation by KPMG has found.

A draft report, recently made public for the first time by the ABC’s 7.30 Report, is said to indicate the KPMG team found that Parliament may have been more vulnerable than was previously known.

Strategies sought by the Australian Signals Directorate and other methods to prevent cyber intrusions were “at a low level of maturity”, the report says.

The draft report also found significant deficiencies in the management of key systems that hold potentially classified information. “Some information systems are not regularly patched due to the legacy nature of their systems,” it says.

To no-one’s great surprise, parliamentary officials are claiming there’s nothing to worry about. A spokeswoman for the Department of Parliamentary Services told 7.30, “Without commenting directly on this confidential draft document, it reflects early fieldwork by KPMG and was not subject to verification by the department.”