Following the recent large Australian data breaches with Optus, Medibank and Latitude Financial, the government will be summoning the nation’s largest banks and financial services companies to a series of cyber war games to test how they would respond to cyber-attacks that could upend the lives of tens of millions of Australians. The home affairs minister said that the recent data breaches Australians suffered were just the tip of the ice berg, and the government was preparing for more profound breaches that could cripple infrastructure assets such as water supply and electricity grid. Last month, the government ran a 3 hour tabletop exercise with representatives from the Reserve Bank, Australian Securities and Investment Commissions, Australian Prudential Regulation Authority and Australian Federal Police. The aim of that exercise was to examine how they would respond to attacks involving the theft of sensitive IT data. Similar exercises will now be held with individual banks before the government moves on to the aviation sector and other critical infrastructure networks.
This segment was created for the It’s 5:05 podcast