Hardening Australia’s critical infrastructure to ensure Cyber Resilience

According to a report published on Statista.com, only 18% of the senior executives across the globe stated that they were 100% sure regarding their enterprise’s ability to successfully handle a cybersecurity assessment. Another 60% of the survey participants reported that they are fairly confident about their enterprise’s cyber resilience measures.

What is cyber resilience?

In layman terms, cyber resilience is all about how well an organization can handle a cyber-attack or a data breach without interrupting its daily operations. If the organization is capable of preparing, responding, and recovering when cyber-attacks happen, then the organization has cyber resilience.

Why is cyber resilience important?

When it comes to cyber-attacks, conventional measures are often not enough. That’s precisely why over the past few years, cyber resilience has greatly become popular. Sooner or later, the hackers are likely going to gain access to various computer systems, and when that happens, your organization should be prepared to work on multiple effective strategies to withstand these cybercrimes.

Now, let’s a detailed look at why cyber resilience is important

• Improves system security

  The primary objective of cyber resilience for an organization is to respond to an attack and survive it quickly while continuing to operate their business effectively. However, by incorporating a cyber resilience program, your enterprise will be able to develop and design various effective strategies that can be proven functional around its existing IT infrastructure. It also helps enhance safety and security across the systems and reduces the possibility and number of cyberattacks.

• Reduces financial loses

  No matter how strong the organization’s firewalls are, the fact is that no business or enterprise is forever safe from the cyberattacks. For small and medium businesses, the financial loses would be between a few thousand to a hundred thousand. But for a large enterprise, the same financial loses would be more than a million dollars. In addition to financial losses, the enterprise also losses its goodwill if the attack is successful. But when the organization has cyber resilience, not only the effect, but the financial losses can also be reduced.

• Improving the enterprise’s IT team

  Of all, the significant benefit of cyber resilience is that it enhances the modus operandi of the IT team daily. With cyber resilience, an enterprise will be able to develop an efficient IT team that can take action as attackers become more evolved.

• Maintaining clients’ trust

  In order to maintain clients’ and customers’ trust that your enterprise took decades to build, it is important to have cyber resilience. If your enterprise has an ineffective strategy or method to cyber resilience, it is likely going to damage your enterprise’s reputation, including your clients, suppliers, customers, etc. whose confidentiality has been breached.

How is Australia vulnerable to cyber-attacks?

Saying Australia is one of the wealthy digital nations is no overstatement. However, it is still highly vulnerable to cyber attackers according to Accenture’s threat intelligence tracking capability, iDefense. The tracker shows that the Australian critical infrastructure is currently facing a high number of cyber attackers from a range of actors. Now, these findings are congruent with the latest statements from Australia’s Information Warfare Division, which is headed by General Marcus Thompson.

The challenges of protecting the utilities

There are 3 main challenges that are involved in protecting the utilities:

• Sophisticated actors

  Most of the time, cyber threats come in the form of highly advanced, persistent attacks that keep lingering and gathering for years without proper exposure. Nation-states organized cyber-crime organizations and other entities have huge amounts of resources and funds, which enable them to harness sophisticated malware. Usually, attacks are disguised as a part of customer traffic, making them extremely hard to find, uncover, or even expose. That is why sometimes, the extent of the damage will not be realized by the enterprises for months and in some cases, years.

• Legacy systems

  Often, critical infrastructure is loaded with solid, bespoke, old IT systems. As the range of these networks is too high, it is not an easy task to make the transition these legacy systems less vulnerable. Without proper security controls and patches, the old IT infrastructure will not be able to handle modern-day advanced threats.

• Central points of failure

  Just like other countries, Australia too has a centralized model of critical infrastructure. Now, this makes it a central point of failure where even a single intrusion point may have a severe impact throughout the whole network.

How to build cyber resilient utilities?

Some enterprises have already implemented cyber resilience strategies, but not all are as effective as the term “Cyber resilience” is fairly new to the industry and is often misunderstood. However, there are ways to enhance the enterprise’s cyber resilience strategies and approaches.

One effective way is identifying potential risks. Regardless of size and scale, all businesses must conduct risk assessments to identify cyber threats and attacks. Now, this includes everything with regard to cybersecurity. Coming to the risk assessments, the best way to do these assessments is by setting up communication across the enterprise. Every single employee in the organization should have a detailed and shared understanding of the IT systems’ vulnerabilities and weaknesses.

Another way is to manage the risks. This approach involves prioritizing threats. What are the chances of each risk occurring? What is the extent of that impact? In this scenario, impact means the financial loss of the enterprise due to the data breach. An enterprise should have answers to these questions in order to decide which scenario should be prioritized.

The third way is managing costs as it greatly improves your enterprise’s cyber resilience. For example, you can invest in employee awareness training as it reduces the chances of risks that occur. In addition to that, you may get a cyber resilience insurance policy since it is a lot cheaper. It is an effective approach to handle potential risks, which would give you access to emergency systems.

Final thoughts

Is cyber resilience important? Yes, it is important as it is an enterprise-wide approach that carefully monitors and reacts to risks, cyber threats, and vulnerabilities. It is a collaborative-approach, including every single employee in the enterprise and extending to clients, customers, suppliers, etc. who have a crystal-clear understanding of the crucial assets associated with information. Now, in order to accomplish a safe level of cyber resilience for your enterprise, the first and foremost step is to understand the information it holds and then decide which data needs to be protected first.

Cyber threats and risks are inevitable and may come sooner or later so it is better for the enterprise to view them as the same as any other setback. Nevertheless, what you should understand is that those threats and risks are preventable and manageable with effective cyber resilience strategies and approaches. Just like enterprises have safety measures for fire or natural disasters, they should have safety measures against such cyber threats too. Given the proliferation of the cyber-attacks, it is essential for enterprises to have a strategy in hand to protect themselves and their data against these attackers.

By working together as a community, government and utilities can prepare Australia’s critical infrastructure to become a resilient and effective front line against ongoing cyber attacks. We, at LetsNurture, not just provide you Mobile and Web Solutions but also gets you a reliable cloud server which can help you keep your own and third-party data safe and secure. Just mail us or get in touch with our executives.

So, let’s join hands together to fight against cybersecurity threats!