‘Stop hackers in their tracks’: Corporate giants muscle up against cyber threats

Corporate giants have joined forces to block online scams aimed at defrauding their customers, in what the federal government and industry say is a groundbreaking intelligence-sharing partnership.

Westpac, Telstra and Woolworths are among a dozen major corporate companies and government agencies that will work together on “threat blocking” measures as part of a new National Cyber Intel Partnership, which forms a key plank of the government’s cybersecurity strategy to be announced next week.

Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil says the government is steering a “world-leading” partnership with major companies to proactively block cyber threats.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

The three companies have devised a pilot program jointly with the National Cyber Security Coordinator, a government office that reports to the Home Affairs minister, that enables them to coordinate their systems to block bank phishing scams used by criminals to dupe customers into handing over their sensitive details such as account numbers.

They are expected to present their findings to the partnership group by the end of the year, with the aim of more companies – including telecommunications giants, banks, internet service providers and other major corporates – adopting the processes and expanding them to block a wider array of cyber threats and malware in the future, including fake job ads and other scam websites.

Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil said the cybersecurity challenges Australia faced were enormous, and the partnership with industry was about “stopping hackers in their tracks”.

“This is a world-leading partnership that brings the Australian government and companies together for the first time to share information and use our collective expertise to better protect our country from cyber threats,” she said.

Other members of the partnership include: Optus, TPG, National Australia Bank, Commonwealth Bank, ANZ, Qantas, National Broadband Network Co, CyberCX, Palo Alto, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, and the Australian Signals Directorate.

The imminent release of the government’s cybersecurity strategy on Tuesday has been somewhat rocked by the sudden recall of Air Marshal Darren Goldie to the Defence Department this week to deal with a workplace matter, just five months after he was hand-picked as the inaugural National Cyber Security Coordinator.

Senior Home Affairs official Hamish Hansford is now acting in the position, and industry officials said they did not expect the leadership change to disrupt progress on the partnership.

Westpac’s chief information security officer Richard Johnson, who co-chaired the pilot with Goldie, said it worked by creating a framework that enabled the bank to inform the Australian Cyber Security Centre of a malicious phishing website that was asking customers to hand over their information.

Bank phishing scams typically take the form of an email or text message impersonating the bank that urges customers to take urgent action on their accounts and directs them to a website to insert their details, which are then used to hack into their banking or engage in identity theft.

The government agency then acts as a conduit between the companies and analyses the website before passing the details onto Telstra to proactively block the website from its customers.

“The more telcos that participate over time means expanded coverage for more and more Australians as more companies come on board with the threat-blocking initiative,” Johnson said.

“I’ve been working in cyber for over 20 years and this is the first I’ve seen of this level of active co-ordination and collaboration between industry and government to deliberately bring our capabilities together and provide real-time protection for Australians against common threats.”

Telstra chief information technology officer Narelle Devine said the telco was already using the pilot program to actively block threats that had been identified by Westpac and Woolworths. She said while companies exchanged threat information all the time, this initiative was different because it involved building machine-to-machine processes across their systems with the aim of it being fully automated in the future.

“The idea is if we can block those threats at scale, we can deliver the impact at scale,” Devine said.

“We’ve got such a common customer base across the big companies, that when we’re able to use the context that those companies provide us for the threats that they see, we can add that to our information.”

Woolworths Group chief security officer Pieter van der Merwe said the company welcomed the ability to share intelligence in real-time with other businesses to help protect Australians, including its 20 million-strong customer base.

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