Les Bell

A coalition of over a dozen major Australian corporations have teamed up to share real-time threat intelligence in an attempt to protect their customers from online scams. The new National Cyber Intel Partnership will be a key component of the government's new cybersecurity strategy, which is due to be introduced tomorrow.

A pilot program run by Westpac, Telstra and Woolworths in collaboration with the National Cyber Security Coordinator in the Department of Home Affairs allowed Westpac, for example, to pass threat intel about a phishing email and website to the ACSC for further analysis, before the details were relayed to telco Telstra to block traffic to the site.

The sharing of threat indicators is currently partially automated, using protocols like STIX and TAXII, with the aim of eventual full automation. The participants in the pilot program are expected to present their findings to other partners by the end of the year, and the scheme is expected to expand to block a much larger range of threats including malware, scam websites and lures to privileged insiders such as fake job ads.

The other members of the Partnership include Optus, TPG, National Australia Bank, Commonwealth Bank, ANZ, Qantas, National Broadband Network Co, CyberCX, Palo Alto, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, and the Australian Signals Directorate, with more companies expected to join in the future..

With the majority of individual consumers and businesses being customers of the major ISP's and banks, the result should be a significant increase in protection, achieved through a kind of shared immune system: once one of the members detects a threat, the entire immune system will act to block it.

In a related announcement, Minister for Home Affairs and Minister for Cyber Security, Clare O'Neill, is today expected to reveal a scheme which will provide funding for security advice and incident response for small businesses, commencing next year. I confess to taking a less sanguine view of this proposal; announcements of free government money to be distributed through individuals and small businesses tend to quickly attract a crowd of bottom feeders, as demonstrated by previous similar schemes. The result could be no improvement in the capabilities of the lowest hanging fruit, and even a drop in the maturity of those who previously were making significant efforts. Then again, anything is better than nothing. . .

Visentin, Lisa, ‘Stop hackers in their tracks’: Corporate giants muscle up against cyber threats, Sydney Morning Herald, 19 November 2023. Available online at https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/stop-hackers-in-their-tracks-corporate-giants-muscle-up-against-cyber-threats-20231117-p5ekva.html.

Upcoming Courses

• SE221 CISSP Fast Track Review, Sydney, 4 - 8 December 2023
• SE221 CISSP Fast Track Review, Sydney, 11 - 15 March 2024
• SE221 CISSP Fast Track Review, Virtual/Online, 13 - 17 May 2024
• SE221 CISSP Fast Track Review, Virtual/Online, 17 - 21 June 2024
• SE221 CISSP Fast Track Review, Sydney, 22 - 26 July 2024

About this Blog

I produce this blog while updating the course notes for various courses. Links within a story mostly lead to further details in those course notes, and will only be accessible if you are enrolled in the corresponding course. This is a shallow ploy to encourage ongoing study by our students. However, each item ends with a link to the original source.

These blog posts are collected at https://www.lesbell.com.au/blog/index.php?user=3. If you would prefer an RSS feed for your reader, the feed can be found at https://www.lesbell.com.au/rss/file.php/1/dd977d83ae51998b0b79799c822ac0a1/blog/user/3/rss.xml.

Copyright to linked articles is held by their individual authors or publishers. Our commentary is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License and is labeled TLP:CLEAR.