Article in the AFR today from one of CVT's board members - David Irvine
Cisco boost pushes Australian Cyber Security Research Institute funding past $150 million
Tech giant Cisco has signed on to become the eighth industry partner in the Australian Cyber Security Research Institute, investing $3 million in the research co-operative.
The capital injection from Cisco brings the total funding for the institute to about $150 million over seven years and ACSRI chairman David Irvine believes this figure will grow.
"We expect more industry partners to join and the really exciting thing is we're going to get the universities to work together too. This isn't a lot of academics sitting in ivory towers ... it has to be effective, serious research projects that lead to concrete results," Mr Irvine said.
He said the institute's research focused on two principle areas. The first is problems facing critical infrastructure in Australia and how to better protect against cyber attacks, and the second is to evaluate cyber-as-a-service, systems architecture and software solutions.
In addition to the institute's eight industry partners, it also has seven university and research institutes and nine government agencies on board.
In September the federal government announced it would supply $50 million in funding for the ACSRI. Tackling threats together
Cisco chief of security and trust office, John Stewart, said the US multinational had decided to back the institute because the company believed it was essential for government, corporate enterprises and universities to tackle the threat collaboratively.
"The ASCRI plays a revolutionary role in that ... and Australia can play a continuing leadership role in that respect," he said.
"At current course and speed, I don't know any countries or education systems that feel confident they have enough people in this space ... This is a time when we have to take 100 ideas, try all of them, and accelerate the workforce we need and get them into play as fast as we can."
The government's investment in the research co-operative follows last year's $230 million cyber security strategy. This year the government also passed mandatory data breach notification laws, requiring companies to disclose when there has been unauthorised access, disclosure or loss of personal information. Australia under-prepared
Mr Irvine, who was formerly the director-general of security for the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, said he realised Australia was under-prepared to battle cyber threats while he was working at ASIO between 2009 and 2014.
"When I first went to ASIO in 2009, one of the first things that struck me was how vulnerable we are in Australia to both state-based cyber attacks and criminal cyber attacks. Frankly, nothing has changed in terms of the potential of those threats," he said.
"Then when I started trying to recruit people to work in this area to build up our capabilities, what we were finding was our national capabilities in terms of skills and so on is still quite low."
To change this, one of the key objectives for the cyber research centre is to build up the country's cyber research skills and qualified training personnel.
Mr Irvine said large scale attacks this year, including WarraCry and Petya, had made cyber security more front-of-mind for big businesses, but he was still concerned small and medium-sized enterprises were not equipped to deal with cyber threats.
"I'm a lot more confident our top 100 companies are on top of the issues and spending money on it, but below the top 100 it drops off considerably," he said.
"Under the new laws, even doctors surgeries that don't have a turnover of more than $3 million will have to start looking at these issues and I'm worried about getting the message to SMEs."
