Australian official lifts lid on cyberwarfare

Australia's top cyberwarrior revealed Wednesday that his country actively participated in the electronic war against the Islamic State group in Syria, degrading their communications during military operations and actively stopping people seeking to join the extremist group.

The director-general of the government-run Australian Signals Directorate, Mike Burgess, spoke publicly for the first time about his agency's work.

Burgess cited an example of how the cyberwarfare body helped the Australian Defense Force and its allies win a critical battle with IS.

"Just as the coalition forces were preparing to attack the terrorists' position, our offensive cyberoperators were at their keyboards in Australia firing highly targeted bits and bytes into cyberspace," Burgess said in a speech at the Lowy Institute, an Australian strategic think tank.

He said IS communications "were degraded within seconds."
"Terrorist commanders couldn't connect to the internet and were unable to communicate with each other. The terrorists were in disarray and driven from their position in part because of the young men and women at their keyboards some 11,000 kilometres or so from the battle."
He said his agency had also inflicted important damage to IS's "media machine" by locking it out of its servers and destroying propaganda material, undermining its ability to "spread hate and recruit new members."