How disruption could help countries such as China and Russia exploit cybersecurity flaws and affect the internet
“China’s extensive penetration of these telecommunications networks over such a long period of time means that Beijing can identify who is under espionage investigation and understand their intelligence gathering methodologies,” he said.
Most worrying is the shift from espionage to subversive attacks. CyberCX says over the past 18 months, nation-state actors, primarily Iran, Russia and China, have continued to normalize sabotage and pre-positioning against Australia’s critical infrastructure and civilian organisations.
Admiral Mike Rogers was also director of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command.Credit: Bloomberg
Rogers said adversaries are using AI “much more aggressively, much faster than defenders,” giving attackers unprecedented speed and scale advantages.
Criminal actors are increasingly “going to disrupt, not just deny,” because “if I can cause some damage or disruption, the target network owner is more likely to pay a ransom.”
Monday’s AWS outage drew comparisons to the 2024 CrowdStrike outage, which was estimated to cause more than $5 billion in damage and ground thousands of flights. Both incidents revealed how seemingly minor technical issues can spiral into global chaos when critical infrastructure is tied to centralized systems.
“The real risk is the potential for highly disruptive attacks by groups with the knowledge and resources to replicate these disruptions at scale,” Rogers said.
Rogers said Australia’s telecommunications infrastructure remained particularly vulnerable, citing recent emergency service outages. “We have created a system that is so complex that we cannot fully understand it,” he said. “We’ve created a system where we don’t really recognize the interdependencies we’ve created.”
Rogers worked on the Australian government’s 2023 cybersecurity strategy.Credit: Bloomberg
AWS is the dominant player in cloud computing worldwide, accounting for nearly a third of the market, twice that of Google and Microsoft.
Rogers emphasized that the biggest long-term challenge is not a single technological solution, but creating integrated partnerships between government and the private sector. He noted Ukraine’s cyber resilience model, in which network owners, government agencies and Western cybersecurity firms collaborate in real time.
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“We are still not where we need to be in terms of government and the private sector working together in an integrated way 24/7,” Rogers said. “While collaboration after the fact is great, it always leaves you behind the power curve.”
Rogers dismissed suggestions that cyber deterrence could work like nuclear deterrence, arguing that Western democracies have not demonstrated sufficient “political will or intent” to use offensive cyber capabilities. This has led authoritarian nations to conclude that “there is a relatively low price to pay” for offensive cyber operations, he said.
When asked what keeps him awake at night, Rogers pointed to two factors: Opponents “behaving disruptively, really aggressively” and their superior use of AI compared to defenders.
“If this is peacetime, I hate to see what wartime looks like,” he said.
