Six politicians targeted by hacking group linked to Chinese government in 2021

All the MPs who were targeted are part of IPAC, or the Inter Parliamentary Alliance on China. It’s essentially a loose global network of MPs who share concerns about China, both what’s happening within China and also its behavior abroad. Now, this wasn’t targeted at Australian MPs alone. This was part of a broader attempt by the Chinese government, through its intelligence agencies, to gather information about all global members or many global members of IPAC across a whole range of countries, including in Europe. The US here in Australia as well as in Asia. So it wasn’t specifically about Australia, but it was still hoovering up Australian MP’s, including these six. For Coalition parliamentarians to Labour parliamentarians who were targeted at the time. Now, what was China trying to achieve? Well, according to analysts who’ve taken a look at this, according to the information released by AUS indictment, essentially it was an attempt to gather information. It was a fairly crude attempt at trying to work out what their patterns of behavior were online, probably, at least according to experts, to try and form a template that they could then use for more sophisticated hacking attempts down the line. So this is something that’s obviously caught quite a lot of attention. It’s only come to light now, these specific details. Because indictments have been unsealed in the United States, even though the Australian government did know about it at the time, these MPs have only learned the full details about exactly what happened to them back in 2021, because these indictments were unsealed, and some of them are not happy about that. And why are some of the parliamentarians so frustrated that they weren’t briefed at the time? Well, the argument from some of these parliamentarians is that it was really incumbent on intelligence agencies, whether that’s ASIO or the ASD, the Australian Signals Directorate, to actually inform them that they were specifically targeted. Now, it’s not yet 100% clear why they weren’t briefed. We’re still waiting on a statement from ASD. We anticipate we might see something later today. The broad explanation, according to one of the MPs who we’ve spoken to, was that the the intelligence agencies. Said that this was a pretty crude and unsuccessful attempt. There are already plenty of warnings that were circulating out there and that there was no pressing need to to brief them. That seems to be the rationale. We’ll have to wait and see exactly what the agencies have to say, but some MPs are really unhappy about this, one of those senators, Claire Chandler, a Liberal, says. It’s staggering. They were kept in the dark and it sounds like now the agencies have agreed that at least in future, if Australian MPs are specifically targeted in this way. They will or they’ve made commitments that they will brief them in the future. So that seems to be a slight shift in the way things operated back in 2021 to the way they’re going to operate from now on.