The Australian government’s cyber security strategy has come under fire from University of New South Wales professors for failing to match up to the policies of its western counterparts when it comes to spending, education, threat identification and critical infrastructure protection. According to the UNSW discussion paper, the government has pledged less money to the problem and failed to adequately address the critical skills shortage, instead focusing on raising awareness and “cyber hygiene”.
“Planned budget growth at the federal level to 2020 is impressive, including for the establishment of thousands of new positions in government agencies and large increases in defence-funded research. But there are several areas in the Australian ambition where key foundations or linking mechanism are absent,” the report’s authors Professor Greg Austin and Professor Jill Slay said.
There is a large gap between US assessments of advanced technology threats and the Australian government’s public assessments. These gaps have important policy implications, as well as negative impacts on the security and prosperity of Australians.
The authors propose that cyber criminals have very little chance of being held accountable unless they’ve targeted the United States government and that fighting cyber crime has been of little importance to the Australian government.
“The Cyber Security Strategy notes that the cost of cyber crime to Australia is between $1 billion and $17 billion. The wide range for this ‘estimate’ is strong evidence how low a priority this area of policy has been,” the paper states.
“To begin to redress this, as the 2013 National Cybercrime Plan suggested, it would definitely be worthwhile to set up a Centre of Excellence in High Tech Crime in Australia … But a more effective pathway may be to move immediately to set up a national cyber crime fighting unit, including research staff, funded to at least $20 million per year for 10 years.”
The discussion paper comes about five weeks after Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced the Coalition’s $230 million cyber security strategy. The strategy included measures such as relocating the Australian Cyber Security Centre from Canberra to a new city, $47 million being spent on establishing joint intelligence sharing centres in capital cities and the creation of about 900 new jobs in intelligence, space and cyber security and throughout government departments.
