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Australia’s cyber spies will soon be able to further protect critical infrastructure as the Australian Government moves to introduce new legislation that will give them better powers.
This Wednesday, the Australian Government will be making changes to the bill designed to protect critical infrastructure from cyber attacks. These changes will include strengthening the cyber spies’ powers to intervene in major attacks across a wide range of essential services under proposed laws.
The changes will also see to the expansion of the list of critical infrastructures to be protected. Infrastructures such as energy, communications, financial services, defence industry and higher education have been added to the list.
Aside from those, research, data storage or processing, food and grocery, health care, space technology, transport and water will also be added to the list of critical infrastructures to be protected.
With the Australian Signals Directorate available as a last resort immediately before, during or following a significant cyber security incident to ensure essential services continue, operators of critical systems will be required to report all cyber incidents to them.
The changes are in line with recommendations from parliament’s bipartisan security committee.
Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews said the Australian Government was committed to protecting essential services including electricity, water, healthcare and groceries.
“Recent cyber-attacks and security threats to critical infrastructure, both in Australia and overseas, make these reforms critically important,” she said.
“They will bring our response to cyber threats more into line with the government’s response to threats in the physical world.”
Minister Andrews said the bill would help businesses focus on delivering goods and services since cyber attacks can misdirect supply chains, shut down payments, and hold customer data to ransom.
The Australian Cyber Security Centre annual threat report showed that a cyber attack was reported every eight minutes, with a quarter of reports affecting critical infrastructure organisations.
The change was influenced by an increase in cyber attacks against large organisations including data theft, extortion and taking services offline, creating significant impacts compared to attacks last year.
This article was first published in Public Spectrum
Eliza Sayon is an experienced writer who specialises in corporate and government communications. She is the content producer for Public Spectrum, an online knowledge-based platform for and about the Australian public sector.
