Cyber preparedness insufficient for growing threats

Dtex co-founder and chief technology officer Mohan Koo has highlighted the urgency with which Australia needs to step up efforts to implement an up-to-date strategy to tackle the growing threat of cyber attacks.

Speaking to Defence Connect, Koo said that, globally, the lack of preparedness around cyber threats was alarming.

“The reason is the bad guys are so much better at collaborating than the rest of us, and the game is changing so quickly and the techniques that they use are developing so fast, that if we're not sharing ideas and thoughts in the same way that they [are], we'll never catch up to them,” he said.

However, Koo did note that in Australia specifically, he had seen a growing awareness of the issue more recently.

“In Australia – particularly in the last year – I’ve seen tremendous growth in the cyber security industry [along with] investment from federal and state government and private industry,” he added, saying “it is the right time, we are spending the right amount to improve ourselves, but certainly we are playing catch up”.

Casting his mind back to the early days as a cyber warrior, Koo said initially the approach had been rather rudimentary.

“Back then there wasn't cyber security, it didn't even exist,” he said. “It was called IT security and not many people even knew what it was back then, but really all it is, is security.

“It's no different to any kind of physical security that we're used to in our airports, homes and office buildings.

“It's the same thing [but] it's just all online nowadays. Being able to protect ourselves from hidden dangers and unknown unknowns is really the difficult challenge.”