92pc of Australian business surveyed suffered cyber attacks in a year

A sobering 92 per cent of Australian organisations say they have suffered one or more business-impacting cyberattacks in the past year.

Tenable country manager for ANZ Scott McKinnel.

A sobering 92 per cent of Australian organisations say they have suffered one or more business-impacting cyberattacks in the past year.

It‘s been more than six weeks since Prime Minister Scott Morrison warned that Australian governments, essential service providers, political bodies, health and education providers were suffering increasing cyber attacks.

With the backdrop of that statement, cyber exposure company Tenable has released the results of a survey commissioned through Forrester Consulting that found that more than nine out of ten Australian businesses surveyed had their activities derailed by cyber attacks in a year, from May 2019 to April 2020.

Equally frightening is that 55 per cent of Australian respondents experienced five or more business-impacting cyberattacks within 12 months.

These businesses are experiencing the growth in attacks that Mr Morrison warned about. Some 73 per cent saw business-impacting cyber attacks increase over the past two years while 76 per cent expect the number of these attacks to increase over the next two years.

Tenable country manager for ANZ Scott McKinnel says the results from the 105 Australian organisations taking part in the international survey “really hasn’t come as a surprise and just validates what you see anecdotally”.

Mr McKinnel said to qualify for the survey, the cyberattacks needed to have caused at least a slight disruption but many caused major headaches.

In one case hackers attacked a control system room and reconfigured an industrial robot and rendered it inoperable. He said it took weeks for the company to get its full production working again. “People are just not aware of how secure they are or aren‘t,” he said.

Mr McKinnel said there had been a definite increase in the distribution of ransomware associated with COVID-19.

He said most of the issues surveyed were associated with criminal activity, rather than state-sponsored attacks.

He said that while the public understood there was significant cyber attack activity, they didn’t seem to comprehend how much there was of it.

The online survey involved 416 security and 425 business executives globally from public (38pc) and private companies (62pc), out of which 7pc are government organisations with 105 respondents from Australia. The study was conducted in April.

Another intelligence team, meanwhile, has warned about a malicious email campaign that claims to be from the Australian Department of Health containing COVID-19 ‘safety and cure’ information.

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This follows an alert by the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) which has warned of an increase in COVID-19 themed cyber activity, targeting the aged care and healthcare sectors.

“This campaign, combined with the increased ransomware attacks on the local aged and healthcare sectors reported by the ACSC, prove criminal activity of this nature will continue to be tailored to play on our significant virus-related fears and wants, as long as it remains a key issue of concern to a wide range of potential victims,” said Mimecast’s Principal Technical Consultant, Garrett O’Hara.

The attackers typically invite users to download a safety information booklet. Clicking on the link will begin the infection of computer systems.