A sweeping new cyber security plan is being unveiled to protect businesses, governments and critical infrastructure from ransomware and attacks by state-sponsored hackers and crime gangs. The federal government's almost $600 million, 7-year plan comes after millions of Australians had their personal details leaked in major cyber-attacks including on Optus and Medibank.
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TVTranscript
00:00 This plan will inject an additional $600 million towards boosting the nation's cyber security
00:09 defences.
00:10 This strategy covers six key areas.
00:13 There'll be $300 million that'll go towards protecting small and medium-sized businesses
00:19 along with growing community understanding about the threat of cyber crime.
00:25 Close to $150 million will be spent on strengthening critical infrastructure.
00:30 Another $130 million will go towards building resilience amongst our regional neighbours
00:37 in the Pacific and South East Asia.
00:40 The plan also notes that many businesses have expressed concerns about the volume of data
00:46 that they're required to keep and the length of time that they're required to store that
00:51 data which makes them a high value target for cyber criminals.
00:56 The government, as part of this plan, will review Commonwealth legislation around what
01:02 data businesses are required to retain and for how long.
01:06 It was also foreshadowed last week that the government would be implementing a new mandatory
01:11 no-fault reporting system for ransomware incidents.
01:16 So essentially businesses will have an obligation to report if they are a victim of ransomware
01:22 and the government says that it intends in the future to move towards an outright ban
01:27 on paying ransoms, although the government says it acknowledges that the nation is not
01:32 ready to move towards a ban quite yet, just yet.
01:36 We heard this morning from the Home Affairs Minister, Clare O'Neill, who said that support
01:41 for small businesses that have been subject to a cyber attack has been lacking.
01:46 Here's some of what she's had to say.
01:48 We've also got, for the first time, a commitment to provide support to small business when
01:53 they're under cyber attack.
01:54 So you would observe the Australian government, if we have an attack on Optus, an attack on
01:58 Medibank, huge resources flock to that company to support them while they recover.
02:02 Yet up till now, small business have had actually genuinely nothing from government.
02:07 Now we recognise that can't continue for small business.
02:09 A cyber event can be fatal to a small business.
02:12 Clare O'Neill says that the threat of cyber attacks is an urgent and pressing issue that
02:18 requires action now.
02:20 She's also said that under the coalition government, under the previous coalition government, the
02:25 nation was in what she described was a cyber slumber, saying that Australian businesses
02:31 and individuals have been left exposed and that Australia's systems are lagging behind
02:37 our allies and our trading partners.
02:40 We've seen over the course of the last 12 to 18 months or so, millions of Australians
02:45 affected by cyber attacks in those high profile attacks on Optus and Medibank, where the data
02:53 of millions of customers was leaked online.
02:56 In the last week and a bit, we've seen one of the nation's largest port operators, the
03:02 victim of a cyber attack with DP World being forced to temporarily shut down its terminal
03:08 operations as it tried to get on top of that cyber attack.
03:12 Clare O'Neill says that a cyber crime is reported every six minutes.
03:17 She says there's reason to believe that in the future, the threat will only continue
03:22 to grow, pointing towards the threat that is posed by artificial intelligence and an
03:27 increasingly challenging geopolitical environment.
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