Taiwan’s Vice Premier Simon Chang wants in on the US government’s Cyber Storm exercises. A biennial exercise series curated by the Department of Homeland security, Cyber Storm tests the capacity of agencies and critical infrastructures to absorb and respond to cyber attacks. Several foreign government agencies, including Australia, have been invited to participate in the exercises in the past. Chang argues that the move would help strengthen the countries’ defences against unrelenting attacks from China. US cyber security firm FireEye released figures in 2014 that showed Taiwan faced the most targeted attacks that sought to steal data in the Asia-Pacific region, a large proportion of which targeted government networks.

US coding site GitHub knows all about unrelenting attacks. The site is enduring the sixth day of a massive DDos attack. The attacks have been traced back to Chinese search engine Baidu and are targeting two specific pages. One, GreatFire, develops ways for users to circumvent the so-called ‘great firewall of China’. The other is a Chinese mirror page for the blocked New York Times website. The company has successfully managed to deflect a large amount of the DDos traffic, which is positive given the amount of companies and programmers who rely on the site as a coding resource.

The US has taken China to the WTO over its proposed new banking technology restrictions, with some success. The new rules, proposed in December were set to force banks to have ‘all new computer servers, desktop computers and laptop computers and 50 percent of new tablets and smartphones meet “security and controllability” requirements’. These moves were developed to encourage ‘indigenous innovation’ and promote ‘cybersecurity’. However, the US government challenged the plan, arguing that they challenged the WTO fair trade rules. It seems that their protests have gained some traction as China has ‘suspended’ the regulations, for now.

While bigger international security issues continue to grab headlines, more mundane cybercrime is arguably far more damaging to the overall stability and security of cyberspace. As Charles Henderson, vice president of managed security testing at Trustwave, characterised the threat to point-of-sale devices, ‘It’s not some ninjas coming through the ceiling on ropes, putting malware on your point of sale in the dead of night… It’s fairly easy attacks.’ The reason that simple attacks can wreak such havoc is that so many businesses are not taking the most basic steps to improve the security of their systems and lack of deep-dive testing.

Of course, one cannot blame businesses for forgoing pragmatic steps to improve cybersecurity when government is setting such a poor example. An Auditor-General’s report found that the information security of four of Tasmania’s largest state bodies were lacking, with all the departments failing to fully implement the top four mitigation strategies from the Australian Signals Directorate. The Department of Treasury and Finance and the Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment struck back, claiming that state agencies do not require the same level of cyber protection as Federal Departments and that the costs don’t justify implementation of these measures.

One group not taking the cyber threat so lightly are lawyers. With further data retention and breach notification legislation in the works, cyber risk insurance market is set to boom and as the Australian Security and Investments Commission continues to focus on incident reporting, companies are likely to ‘face greater compliance and regulatory burden’ in cyber risk management.

While greater investment in business cybersecurity would be a welcome step, without proper information sharing within the private sector and between government and businesses, the cards will remain heavily stacked against the defenders. Step one to facilitate information sharing is building trust, no easy task. Deepak Jeevankumar offers a call to arms and a few suggestions to bridge the trust chasm, including the appointment of Chief Trust Officers and expiration dates for data. The US Congress has been set to take a crack at this challenge as well, however Jennifer Granick tempers expectations, calling this a banner year for flawed cyber information sharing proposals.

Of course all of this will be moot when the robots take over. DARPA is kicking off a two-year competition to lay the groundwork for automated cyber defence. Although very much at its early stages and a fully-automated systems is not likely anytime soon, initial tests have been promising and these systems could offer a more cost effective way for companies to automatically spot and fix vulnerabilities.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has declared its intent to establish a fully integrated Community that extends across the economic, political, security and social realms by the end of 2015. Such a regional arrangement would, for the first time, provide the countries of Southeast Asia with a single regime of intergovernmental collaboration that can be used to draft, implement and refine joint policies and courses of action. That would greatly facilitate future proactive planning and aid the development of comprehensive and codified forms of supranational cooperation and governance.

The main aim of those changes is to better situate ASEAN to achieve its core goal of ‘centrality’—a term coined to emphasise how internal cohesion can be leveraged to both advance economic progress and manage the Association’s relations with external partners. Read more

The Obama administration’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) aims to provide a comprehensive guide as to how the United States intends to secure its national interests and global position. It’s long overdue given that the previous version dates back to 2010. In the meantime, Russia’s annexed the Crimea and supported Ukrainian separatists, the Islamic State’s created havoc in the Middle East, and Iran’s moved closer to a nuclear weapons breakout capability. From an Australian point of view, what the NSS says about America’s future role and strategy for the Asia–Pacific region is of particular interest. That’s because China’s growing power and its assertiveness in regards to territorial disputes have regional allies and partners wondering about Washington’s staying power in Asia. In fact, how the US deals with the rise of China will do much to determine regional stability and the future of US leadership.

The NSS attempts to reassure Asia–Pacific allies and partners that the US will ‘advance our rebalance to Asia and the Pacific’. It posits that American leadership in this part of the world ‘will remain essential’, a proposition most Australian observers would agree with. When it comes to China, it states that while the US welcomed the ‘rise of a stable, peaceful, and prosperous China’, it would ‘manage competition from a position of strength while insisting that China uphold international rules and norms’. It’s clear that Washington expects Sino-US competition to grow, in part because attempts to reach a mutual understanding about how to organise their relationship have so far proved elusive. The NSS signals to Beijing that the concept of a ‘new type of great power relationship’ promoted by President Xi—and initially accepted by President Obama—isn’t a sustainable basis for the relationship. Both sides have divergent interpretations of what it means, with China using it to justify the creation of ‘spheres of influence’ in the Western Pacific. That’s rattled the nerves of US allies and partners, and threatened to erode US leadership credentials. Read more

Since late 2013, Beijing has been promoting its ‘Maritime Silk Route’ (MSR) initiative as a proposed oceanic complement to its various overland ‘Silk Route’ projects. Details remain sketchy, but the proposal appears to envisage a system of linked ports, infrastructure projects and special economic zones in Southeast Asia and the northern Indian Ocean. While much of the public discussion to date has focused on ports and infrastructure, probably of greater significance is the development of new production and distribution chains across the region, with China at its centre. The concept might be seen as akin to Japan’s ‘flying geese’ strategy of the 1970s when Japanese companies outsourced component production to successive tiers of lower-cost states in Southeast Asia.

If implemented, the initiative would bind countries in the Bay of Bengal and the northern Indian Ocean much closer to the Chinese economy. Several states in the region, including the Maldives, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh have indicated an in-principle agreement to participate in the MSR and are keen to encourage Chinese investment in port and transport infrastructure and manufacturing facilities. India has been much more circumspect about the proposal, and the visit of President Xi Jinping to Delhi in September 2014 failed to elicit an endorsement of the project from Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Read more

The Bay of Bengal is fast becoming a key area of economic and strategic competition in the Indo-Pacific. It’s the largest bay in the world and forms an important, if neglected, part of southern Asia. Bookended by India on its western side and Thailand to its east, with Bangladesh, Myanmar and Sri Lanka in between,  this part of the Asian littoral hosts a huge population and is passed by some of the world’s most important trading routes. But the area has long been ignored by Australia. Countries such as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Myanmar missed out on the great economic boom experienced by the East Asian tigers during the latter part of the twentieth century and so trade with Australia is relatively meagre. The Bay is not given the strategic attention lavished on East Asia, West Asia or the Middle East. Nor has it seen the hype given to India as an emerging regional power. Indeed, much of the Bay has been of little interest to the world, other than in terms of poverty, natural disasters and political instability.

Few now even perceive the Bay as constituting a ‘region’.  Since the end of World War II, geographers, academics and diplomats preferred to cut the Bay in two, drawing a sharp line between what came to be called ‘Southeast Asia’ and ‘South Asia’.  As a result, specialists on Southeast Asia tend to know little about South Asia and vice versa. Those mental maps and divisions may have made more sense in the last century, but they make much less now as deep historical interconnections across the Bay reassert themselves and the area grows in economic and strategic importance. Read more