During the Migration Institute of Australia National Conference held in Sydney today on the 12th October, the Department of Home Affairs announced that subsequent issues following the recent cyber-attack on the 5th October 2023 have now been addressed. A small number of users were impacted whereby they were unable to access systems for several days with the website temporarily taken down, with the Department advising that no data was accessed by the perpetrator and cyber security response arrangements actioned and put in place.
The cyber-attack occurred after the home affairs website was hit with a distributed denial-of-service attack, thought to be coordinated by a pro-Russian hacker in response to Australia’s support for Ukraine. A DDoS attack attempts to make a service inaccessible to intended users by flooding a service with traffic. A spokesperson for the Department of Home Affairs has announced that “ICT continues to closely monitor any changes in the current situation including ImmiAccount system traffic and stability. The Department acknowledges the impact of ImmiAccount Outages on individual and commercial users, and will continue to monitor and provide support to assist users.“