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The Australian Government, through the partnership between the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) and Nominet Cyber, is taking steps to protect the government’s valuable data from attacks made by cybercriminals and other malicious actors.
According to the ACSC’s latest Annual Cyber Threat Report, government networks, which provide essential services such as healthcare and education, accounted for 35 per cent of cyber incidents that were reported in the 2020–21 financial year.
Because of the risk these networks face, the Australian Government launched the Australian Protective Domain Name Service (AUPDNS) to prevent cybercriminals from gaining a foothold.
Under the AUPDNS, the protection of government networks will be enhanced by blocking connections to malicious websites that contain threats such as ransomware, malware and other cyber dangers.
The AUPDNS is a free opt-in service available to all Federal, State and Territory government entities that perform critical services for Australians.
Assistant Minister for Defence Andrew Hastie revealed that the AUPDNS has already analysed over 10 billion queries and blocked over 1 million connections to malicious domains.
“Throughout the Census, AUPDNS processed around 200 million queries a day and blocked more than 10,000 connections to known malicious domains, any one of which could have resulted in a phishing or ransomware attack,” he said.
“Currently AUPDNS is protecting over 200,000 users, and this number is growing”
AUPDNS automatically checks incoming and outgoing network traffic against a list of high‑risk websites and email servers.
This helps prevent accidental access to harmful websites and fights malware that might be hidden on a government network, stopping the theft of sensitive data or deployment of destructive ransomware.
Information from AUPDNS also helps build the ACSC’s national cyber threat picture which is shared with the community to protect every Australian.
This technology, which was delivered via the partnership between the ACSC and Nominet Cyber, formed part of the defensive suite that helped to protect this year’s digital Census.
AUPDNS is one of a number of initiatives introduced by the Australian Government as part of the Cyber Security Strategy 2020 to help protect Australians.
The initiative also adds to the ACSC’s pilot Critical Infrastructure Uplift Program to improve the security and resilience of Australia’s essential services.
This article was first published on Public Spectrum
Eliza Sayon is an experienced writer who specialises in corporate and government communications. She is the content producer for Public Spectrum, an online knowledge-based platform for and about the Australian public sector.
