PROTECTING AUSTRALIA’S CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE

The Australian Government is continuing to boost the cyber resilience of Australia’s most important critical infrastructure, with the declaration of another 46 Systems of National Significance.

This brings the total number of Systems of National Significance to over 200 assets across the energy, communications, transport, financial services and markets, food and grocery and data storage or processing sectors.

This is just one of the ways that our government is working constructively with business to protect our national security.

Being declared a System of National Significance means the Australian Government can apply a robust set of enhanced cyber security obligations on the owners and operators of those assets, to better protect Australians.

These obligations include developing incident response plans to prepare for a cyber attack, undertaking cyber security exercises to build cyber preparedness, undertaking assessments to identify and fix vulnerabilities and providing system information to the Australian Signals Directorate to develop and maintain a near-real time threat picture.

Systems of National Significance are privately declared under section 52B of the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act 2018.

The list of Systems of National Significance is not released publically to protect our national security.

Quotes attributable to Minister for Home Affairs and Cyber Security, Tony Burke:

“These declarations will ensure industry has the plans in place to protect Australia’s most essential critical infrastructure.

“Critical infrastructure networks globally are being targeted by malicious actors and Australia is not immune.

“The Australian Government is relentlessly focused every day on helping our country prepare for and safeguard against a significant cyber attack or other attempt to undermine our critical systems, but it’s not something we can do alone.

“The Government appreciates the owners and operators of Systems of National Significance for joining us in the fight against malicious actors and protection our national security.”

ENDS