Major cyber attack on a bank would be ‘catastrophic’: Senator

Speaking to ifa, shadow minister for cyber security and the shadow minister for countering foreign interference, Senator James Paterson, said safety measures such as multi-factor authentication are an essential bare minimum if you are going to have a remote workforce.

“It may turn out to be the case that the Medibank hack occurred because someone who was working remotely had access and wasn’t sufficiently protected. If they were compromised, that would give criminals access to the data. Now imagine if that happened to one of our banks or other major financial institutions. It would be catastrophic,” he said.

However, Mr Paterson said the financial services industry is generally one of the more mature industries when it comes to cyber security because they have good business reasons to do so.

“They have been investing in it because the security of payments and transactions are so important to what they do. But nobody is completely immune and an increase in remote working does increase that risk,” he said.

Researchers from the University of Queensland (UQ) have urged Australian organisations to prioritise cyber security training for board directors in the wake of the Optus data breach.

A timely study conducted by the researchers has found that directors are not always aware of their duties and liabilities in relation to cyber security and often do not understand its importance.

“As the data breach at Optus this month demonstrates, no organisation is immune to cyber crime,” warned study co-author Dr Ivano Bongiovanni from the UQ Business School.

Dr Bongiovanni said that the research, which included interviews with non-executive directors from 43 organisations, identified a lot of uncertainty about current best practices and industry guidelines for cyber security strategies.