The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) has provided new details on the theft of 30GB of “commercially sensitive” defence designs.

Documents on projects including the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program, the P-8 Poseidon “submarine killer” plane, and detailed designs of Australian Navy ships, were stolen.

The ASD has presented a detailed review of its investigation into the hack, with ASD incident response manager Mitchell Clarke revealing that the attacker gained “full, unfettered access to the environment” of the victim.

The experts say the attacker appeared to be “an APT [advanced persistent threat] group or nation state group”.

The ASD nicknamed the attacker “APT Alf”, after the Alf Stewart character in Home & Away.

“He’s just an angry dude,” Mr Clarke said.

The victim is an Australian aerospace engineering firm “four levels of subcontracting down” from those who work on both Australian and US Defence agencies, including Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

Most of the 30GB of data that APT Alf stole was related to high-profile allied Defence projects, including the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), details of Lockheed’s C-130 planes, the Boeing P-8 Poseidon plane, Boeing’s Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) smart bombs, and of “a few Australian naval vessels”.

“We found one document that was like a wire diagram of one of the Navy’s new ships,” Mr Clarke said.

“You could zoom in down to the captain’s chair and see that it’s one metre away from the [navigator’s] chair – all very good exfil for the actor.”

Tech news outlet ITnews has covered the theft in detail, here.