The minister said the government was preparing for worst-case scenarios following last year’s majorOptus andMedibank data breaches.
Between these breaches andlast week’s attack on Latitude Financial – in which an estimated 14 million customer records were accessed by hackers – O’Neil said virtually every Australian had been directly affected by a cyberattack or knew someone who had been.
“Instead of data breaches,we could have data integrity attacks – where small errors are induced in compromised sets with outsize implications,such as financial records,” O’Neil told the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Sydney Dialogue on Tuesday.
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O’Neil,who is responsible for cybersecurity,described financially motivated hackers and extortionists as “public enemy number one”.
“These groups subvert legitimate business models for financial gain,creating online portals for ‘hacking as a service’ where anyone can purchase the tools and support necessary to conduct a cyber incident or data,especially in the form of a ransomware attack.”
Meanwhile,she said state-sponsored Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) were the “apex predators” of the cyber world.