In Brief
- A Senate estimates hearing has revealed that a parliamentarian's WhatsApp account was compromised in March.
- The hacking led to WhatsApp being briefly blocked in parliament.
The Department of Parliamentary Services (DPS) temporarily blocked desktop WhatsApp access in Parliament House earlier this year after "a foreign state actor" hacked a parliamentarian's account, a Senate estimates hearing has heard.
The parliamentarian, who wasn't named during the hearing on Monday, reported to the department after learning their three staffers' and their own WhatsApp accounts — on both personal and DPS-managed devices — were compromised on 6 March.
Mike Webb, chief information officer at DPS, told the hearing that the accounts were hacked through phishing, a cyberscamming method that lures people to provide their personal information.
"The objective is to take over the accounts, which is what did occur," Webb told the hearing.
In this case, verification codes to access whatsapp on a web browser were accessed by the hackers.
In response to the hacking, the DPS contacted the Australian Signals Directorate and temporarily blocked the messaging service from the parliamentary computing network over the coming weekend on desktop devices.
Webb told the hearing evidence suggesta "a foreign state actor" was behind the hacking.
"There's lots of public reporting of state-sponsored WhatsApp phishing campaigns targeting government officials," Webb said, adding that multiple countries, such as Germany and the United States, have issued warnings on this type of attack.
"So this is targeting our parliamentarians, but it is a genuine global issue."
Nicola Hinder, deputy secretary and chief operating officer at DPS, confirmed that the department had detected 46 cases of malware and around 20,000 phishing attempts targeting parliamentarian and DPS devices this financial year.
Liberal senator James McGrath then asked if those numbers were "quite low", and Hinder said the number of attempts was "cyclical".
"We've indicated before that we've had high numbers, without talking about it too much," Hinder said.
"I think there are times when we have much higher attempts, and times when obviously attention is diverted elsewhere."
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