Cybersecurity expert Ciaran Martin says the West has become too blase about data hacks

His visit comes after health fund Medibank earlier this week ruled out paying a ransom to stop criminals from releasing customer data of 9.7 million Australians.

Medibank’s woes follow telecommunications company Optus’s data breach, which involved the personal information of 9.8 million customers, while a Woolworths subsidiary, MyDeal, had the details of 2.2 million customers stolen and sold online.

Professor Martin said failing to stop breaches and ransomware attacks would have a cumulative effect and damage confidence in the digital economy.

“If they’re haemorrhaging data all the time, or getting ransomed all the time, then that’s not going to help with that process,” he said.

Professor Martin said the data breaches had left two significant lessons for businesses.

He said public attention had shifted in recent years from data breaches, where data was used by criminals for financial gain through identity theft, to ransomware attacks where data was stolen with demands for payment to return it.

“In security – and cybersecurity is no exception – you can tend to move on too quickly from problems you think have gone away,” Professor Martin said.

“We’ve been chasing ransomware understandably for the last year as the clearest and imminent danger to most organisations. But in Australia, and it may be just bad luck or it might be something more nefarious, but data breaches are back as a big problem and it shows we haven’t mastered it yet.

“The second thing I’d say, and some of this has got to do with data retention policies in Australia, but it’s a reminder of the harm that can be done through data breaches. I think we got a bit blasé in the West about data breaches partly because quite a few of the ones that were big in the headline numbers actually didn’t do much harm.

“[But] when you get into rich data sets that involve things like passports and drivers’ licences, this causes real trouble.”

Professor Martin said US President Joe Biden’s move to heavily restrict the export of semiconductors to China was the latest move in the “splinternet” as the West and China diverged on technology and the online world.

He said western countries needed to shift away from being strategically dependent on Chinese technology, proposing deeper cooperation in a similar way as nations do on defence and intelligence.

“For the long-term strategic sustainability of western industrial capability for free and open tech, we need an alliance of democratic countries that work together that plan outcomes that are consistent with markets and competition but just make sure that everyone is not gobbled by China’s long-term plan based on deep markets, 1.5 billion domestic customers and the hacking of commercial secrets of other countries,” he said.

Comments are closed.