Cyber attacks today’s biggest threat: Telstra’s Andrew Penn

Cybersecurity is one of the ­primary threats during the COVID-19 pandemic, Telstra chief executive Andy Penn says.

Telstra CEO Andy Penn works from home during the COVID-19 crisis Picture: Aaron Francis

Cybersecurity is one of the ­primary threats during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Telstra chief executive Andy Penn, who is launching an initiative to help protect the telco’s business and consumer customers from malicious attacks.

Telstra on Wednesday is kicking off a “cleaner pipes” initiative, which Mr Penn says will reduce instances of hackers compromising customer data through malware, ransomware and phishing.

“As we’ve all moved to work and study from home, one of the consequences is a much more vulnerable cyber environment,” Mr Penn told The Australian.

“We’re doing a lot of our online activity through VPNs, remotely, and that creates a different cyber dynamic.

“We are also unfortunately seeing an egregious use of COVID as a cover for cyber attacks. In the past month about 500 of our customers’ devices have been affected by a banking trojan … A COVID-themed SMS. There are a lot of people using the cover of COVID to perpetuate cyber crimes.”

Mr Penn, who is also chair of the government’s Cyber Security Industry Advisory Panel, said the telco would significantly bolster its Domain Name System (DNS) filtering, which he said was already proactively and automatically blocking millions of mal­ware communications each week.

Telstra has been trialling the technology for 12 months, he said, including blocking the command and control communications of botnets and malware and stopping the downloading of remote access trojans, backdoors and banking trojans.

“We know many consumers and small businesses do not have the resources to adequately protect themselves,” Mr Penn said.

“The main challenge is that the people in the community who are perhaps least in a position to protect themselves end up the most vulnerable. We can play a bigger role here, otherwise people lose confidence in doing things online at exactly the time they need to do things online.”

He said if customers clicked on a link to a malicious or suspicious site that has been blocked, they would be directed to a web page alerting them to what had happened.

Mr Penn’s comments echo those of ANZ risk officer Kevin Corbally, who said last week he believed the biggest threat to the financial sector during the coronavirus shutdown was heightened cyber-criminal activity.

“I would argue that in the current environment, they’re probably even higher risks now as criminal activities. Criminals look at how they can actually utilise the COVID-19 situation to impact our customers and our bank as well,” Mr Corbally said.

Mr Penn pointed to statistics from Microsoft that cyber attacks cost Australian businesses $29bn annually in direct losses.

He added that he has downloaded the COVIDSafe app, despite security concerns about its data being stored by Amazon Web Services, which has a server in Sydney owned by a Chinese consortium. He said he had been encouraging Telstra’s teams to download it in a bid to hasten a return to normality for Australians.

“Supporting a recovery is a positive thing, and we certainly have been encouraging our teams to download the app,” Mr Penn said.