The Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) sounded the alarm on March 3, urging organisations to follow tech giant Microsoft’s instructions to patch vulnerable systems which came under threat by a state-sponsored Chinese cyber attacker. This comes after Microsoft announced on March 2 that a cyber actor based in China, which they called “Hafnium,” hacked its email server software, Microsoft Exchange. The extent of Hafnium’s operations in the United States included the targeting of a multitude of sectors for the purposes of exfiltrating important information. These sectors included infectious disease researchers, law firms, higher education institutions, defense contractors, policy think tanks, and NGOs. On March 9, ACSC’s further analysis identified ongoing extensive targeting and compromises, the ramifications of which involve private data and emails falling into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). ACSC released the update detailing that a large number of Australian organisations have yet to update their systems, …