After rolling out the hack-back powers to the government & corporate officials over cyber attacks, the Australian Prime Ministerial Administration is planning to penalize companies that come under cyber attacks since they cannot take preventive measures beforehand.
As of now the new strategy is being discussed by the Department of Home Affairs and after a month long public consultation will be signed as an executive order to be added into the 2020 cyber security strategy.
Early this month, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison issued an order that companies coming under state funded cyber attacks will be powered to launch cyber attacks on those who launched attacks on them- as a retaliation move.
Now, all those companies that cannot protect their critical infrastructure under normal circumstances by taking necessary Cybersecurity measures are reported to be penalized as per the new order- following the lines of the White House of United States that issued a similar order under trump administration in mid 2018.
The Australian government is planning to add banking, health, education, food and cloud data into the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act that has already entities like ports, electricity, water and gas into it.
Mr. Morrison’s government is planning to leave federal and democratic government organizations out of the law for reasons till this year end.
A consultation paper released on this note confirms the action and has confirmed devising mechanisms to ensure governments are held to the same standard of potential to domino effect if the strategies fail for what they are meant to do.
Also, the Morrison government wants companies to share threat intelligence insights and trends with them as that will lead them to gain an aggregate threat picture and comprehensive understanding of potential risks to critical infra. At the same time, it will help the government in organizing cyber war games for companies to facilitate them in thwarting cyber attacks in real time that in-turn will help in developing a playbook of response plans to tackle many such scenarios.
