Community cyber defence - the key to cyber resilience

Resilience is a word that has grown in prominence, becoming a staple in the vocabulary of our media and politicians; bushfires, floods, pandemics. Cyber is not immune to this with resilience becoming its most recent adjunct.

Not unlike the recent wave in the use of the term ‘cyber’, has ‘cyber resilience’ become a catch-all phrase? Does it risk losing its relevance? Or is this an opportunity to capitalise on our nation’s protection and defence against threat actors in cyberspace?

You don’t need to look far to understand cyber resilience, with the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) defining it as ‘the ability to adapt to disruptions caused by cyber security incidents while maintaining continuous business operations’ and ‘this includes the ability to detect, manage and recover from cyber security incidents’. Other than a few tweaks, it is a consistent definition across the international landscape in governments and large enterprises. In simple terms, cyber resilience is about positioning your business to withstand and maintain operational continuity if a disruption occurs due to a cyber security incident.

Easy, right? Because of course, we all have an up to date Business Continuity Plan that gives us confidence, we all have a team of skilled IT, cyber security and intelligence professionals that are proactive, a strong cash flow to support constant upgrades to our network infrastructure and a CISO that oversees all of this for us.

What is easy for businesses, no matter the size, is to become complacent, fatigued or overwhelmed with cyber security, especially when you’re focusing on today’s operations or the challenges of tomorrow.

Cyber, cyber threats, cyber security or cyber [insert any word here] can lead you down an unknown path of wandering instead of a path to cyber resilience. This is why we take a first-principles approach to cyber resilience - it’s not just about protection and detection but a focus on individual preparation and leveraging collective defence to create a protective cyber security environment for your business and Australia. This is at the core of giving effect to the term ‘cyber resilience’.

We have a simple mission at Cybermerc to forge a collective cyber defence for Australia and its partners that is powered by a community of business, industry and government. With an ethos of securing Australia’s digital borders embedded within each of us, we have tackled cyber resilience at its core and in its simplest form, developing an Australian solution for us as individuals, the local family business in our suburbs or all the way to critical infrastructure of national interest and multinational companies. Collaboration to defend against common enemies gives us a compounding advantage. We each contribute small pieces of information to the fight, greatly increasing our collective knowledge and ability to fight back. Bad guys are only able to repeat their attacks when we are isolated. Together we present a much stronger defence and challenge to their skills.

Taking a cyber resilience first approach to cyber security, the AUSHIELD suite of solutions connects Australia together in defensive collaboration against shared threats. It provides defence-grade cyber security protection to all; an individual or small business is provided with the same protection as a large enterprise but without the need for resources, ongoing updates to technology or the financial burden. The proactive collaboration on threat intelligence across large businesses and government in AUSHIELD provides benefits to the whole AUSHIELD community; a community-powered collective defence that provides and maintains cyber resilience across all.

For a deeper dive into AUSHIELD, it consists of three threat intelligence solutions that construct a community-powered network akin to a protective dome against cyber threats. PROTECT is a network security solution providing behavioural based threat detection and protection for Australian small to medium businesses. They are connected to DEFEND, a national Cyber Threat Sharing Platform where Australian organisations can proactively collaborate and defend each other by sharing information on the latest cyber threats across the network. The last piece is DETECT, specifically designed to detect, degrade and deceive advanced threat actors. It is aimed at understanding “what is next” for proactive defence.

It is too easy to get lost in the myriad of cyber security models, frameworks, products and solutions that we can forget the old adage of ‘prevention is better than cure’. We don’t want to see ‘cyber resilience’ become another catch-all phrase, nor lose its relevance or importance to small businesses (who are the backbone of our economy!) or for large enterprises or governments to be blindsided by their supply chain.

Cyber resilience is fundamental for Australian prosperity. We each have a part to play in seeing this come to fruition. So come and join us to create a community that shares, defends and collaborates on cyber threats so that we are all secure together.