Summer in Australia. The time of year where temperatures sit at an all-time high, as does the need for crisis planning and preparations. The heat of the summer brings with it the blazes of bushfires, because Covid-19 isn’t the only villain at our doorstep. We truly live in an uncertain world, but that shouldn’t be a surprise because experts have been alerting us to the crisis that comes with bushfires for years. The one aspect of this whole spiral of crises that is a certainty is the need for a cybersecurity plan and cyber resilience measures.
Scalable Defenses Needed
According to Australia’s Defence Force, our country has a comprehensive cyber-defence measures. However, these defensive measures lack the ability to be scaled across the whole nation. That doesn’t mean it is an impossible task, yet barriers and challenges. A report from the National Resilience Taskforce, along with articles circulating online, have highlighted the following challenges to this goal:
- The coordination problems between the state and federal government in response to crisis;
- The lack of resilience within the national supply chain;
- Physical infrastructure recovery is slow and brittle; and
- Cyber-attacks tend to focus on vulnerabilities, whereas fires and viruses target the masses.
Call To (Cyber) Arms
To address these challenges, a policy to introduce cyber-resilient volunteers would help Australia to scale its cyber defences, while patching up its vulnerabilities as it deals with the ‘Crisis Season’. But how exactly is the cyber-resilience volunteer program beneficial?
- The volunteer organization can close the gap between unclear roles and responsibilities between states and the private sector when it comes to responding to crises;
- Volunteers will be able to boost federal cooperation and resourcing to crisis response while also addressing local needs;
- Cyber volunteers can contribute vital on-the-ground knowledge when responding to crises; and
- Cyber volunteering can ensure that messages from the federal government regarding the crisis are supported while also informing the local public of the response plan and minimizing the spread of misinformation.
Having such a program is definitely a push to a better responsive framework. However, under the current framework development it is yet to be determined how this program will run.
Contact us for more information on Incident and Crisis response framework and planning, and comprehensive cybersecurity stratgies.
Author: Saeed Baayoun, Agilient Consultant