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Following the Medibank data leaks, Cyber Security Minister Clare O’Neil has proposed several improvements to secure personal data.
Clare O’Neil, Australia’s Cyber Security Minister, implemented a new cyber task force to fight against online hackers. According to Ms O’Neil, there are compelling reasons to make it unlawful for businesses to try to buy their way out of problems. She called the scammers “scumbags.”
She does not want Australia to be a soft target of online disruption in the form of hacking.
“That can be hard when we’ve got people who foreign governments are essentially harbouring,” she said.
She wants the country to wake up out of cyber-slumber. She emphasised that it would be illegal if companies meet ransom requests. Thus, she imposed several reforms to serve as armour for personal data.
“We’re standing strong as a country against this; we don’t want to fuel the ransomware business model,” Ms O’Neil said.
The federal government established a new task force to “hack the hackers” on Saturday, combining the skills of the AFP and the country’s cyber intelligence agency, the Australian Signals Directorate.
However, it was a boomerang for the Australian Federal Police on Friday as they named the perpetrators of the Medibank hack. After they outed the criminals, sensitive client data was published on the dark web.
More burdensome regulations may also apply to data retention, which Clare O’Neil described as a “national vulnerability.”
The attacks have impacted former Optus and Medibank customers who had not used the companies in up to a decade.
Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus is reviewing the Privacy Act and is considering data retention.
“We need to ensure that companies are only holding data for the point in time where it’s actually useful,” O’Neil said.
On Sunday, Ms O’Neil attempted to establish expectations for what justice for cyber criminals might look like.
She asked Australia to “get away from the notion that the only positive consequence here is someone in jail.”
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