iscover
Share this article on:
Powered by
MOMENTUM
MEDIA
The Australian Taxation Office’s Commissioner of Taxation outlined his fears over cyber security while addressing the media.
The ATO’s Commissioner of Taxation, Chris Jordan, has used an address to the National Press Club in Canberra to talk about cyber security, admitting that the risk of an incident keeps him awake at night.
The bulk of Commissioner Jordan’s speech was on tax reform, and he fielded questions about ATO relations with consulting firms and a possible new debt collection scheme, but Jordan touched on the cyber security challenges the ATO faced.
According to Jordan, the ATO expects sophisticated fraud, in particular, “will only continue to grow”.
“We hold about 50 petabytes of data,” Jordan (pictured) told the Press Club, as reported by The Guardian. “Now, to put that into context, that’s equivalent to 1 billion tall filing cabinets … Our security system and advanced systems monitor, they do detect and respond to cyber threats that face us at the ATO. On average, we defend against 4.7 million attempted cyber attacks each month.”
“They target our websites, our services, and our infrastructure. And while we navigate these challenges, we have to keep pace with technology while continuing to innovate and expand our use of data to drive digitalisation. However, I’m not under any illusions the ATO of 2024 is perfect.”
Jordan also fielded questions on cyber security at the ATO, admitting he was worried about the “industrialisation of identity theft through large-scale cyber breaches”, especially in light of the big breaches of 2022 and 2023.
“There was a situation recently where 30,000 new super funds were created in a very short period of time, using information from the dark web that they had received from the big data breaches,” Jordan said.
“But the curious bit of this was – they were using bots. The criminals couldn’t fill out the forms to create the new super funds quick enough, so they devised a bot to do that work for them.
“Now, this is scary stuff; this is something that we really have to keep on top of, we really have to keep investing in, we have to keep convincing government that is something that continuous funding will be required.”
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.
Be the first to hear the latest developments in the cyber industry.
