Australia Faces Growing Risk of Cyber Sabotage from China, Warns Intelligence Chief

Australia’s top intelligence official has warned that hackers linked to the Chinese government and military are increasingly targeting the nation’s critical infrastructure, leaving the country vulnerable to “high-impact sabotage” that could disrupt daily life and national security.

In a stark address to business leaders in Melbourne, Mike Burgess, director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), said the country was facing “unprecedented levels of espionage” and a growing threat of cyber-enabled attacks over the next five years. He cautioned that these operations were not only about stealing data but about preparing the ground for potential sabotage against vital networks.

“There is one nation state, no prizes for guessing which one that is conducting repeated attempts to scan and penetrate critical infrastructure in Australia and among our allies,” Burgess said. “They are targeting water supplies, transport systems, telecommunications, and energy networks.”

Although Burgess did not name China directly, his remarks clearly referred to Beijing. The Chinese embassy in Canberra has been contacted for comment.

Burgess said authoritarian governments were becoming more willing to “disrupt and destroy” rather than simply spy, reflecting a dangerous evolution in cyber conflict. He highlighted two China-linked hacking groups, Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon, as key threats. Both have previously been accused by U.S. authorities of infiltrating telecom and infrastructure networks across the Pacific region.

“These are hackers working on behalf of Chinese intelligence and the military,” Burgess said. “Their operations involve not just stealing sensitive information but positioning themselves to carry out sabotage at a time of their choosing.”

He explained that Salt Typhoon had focused on espionage, targeting U.S. telecommunications networks while probing Australian systems as well. Volt Typhoon, he said, had taken a more aggressive approach by embedding malware in U.S. infrastructure that could be used to cause large-scale disruption. “We have seen the same pattern of probing activity here in Australia,” he added.

Burgess warned that cyber sabotage could have devastating consequences, far beyond temporary outages. “Imagine if a hostile state took down our communications networks, shut off power during a heatwave, polluted our water supply, or froze the financial system,” he said. “We often underestimate how disruptive such attacks could be.”

He also revealed that espionage continues to cause significant financial damage to Australia’s economy, costing an estimated A$12.5 billion (US$8.2 billion) in 2023-24 alone. Roughly A$2 billion of that loss came from stolen trade secrets and intellectual property.

According to Burgess, foreign actors are expanding their targets beyond government agencies, aggressively going after private companies and investment projects that could give foreign firms a commercial advantage. “They are also after customer data,” he said. “These operations are highly sophisticated, using advanced methods to test digital defenses and establish long-term, undetected access to networks.”

The ASIO chief urged businesses to take cybersecurity seriously, warning that the next major act of sabotage might not come from a battlefield but from within a computer network. “This is not science fiction,” he said. “It is the reality of modern espionage, and Australia must be prepared.”