Ms BYRNES (Cunningham) (14:17): My question is to the Minister for Cyber Security. How is the Albanese Labor government helping to strengthen cybersecurity for Australians?
Mr BURKE (Watson—Minister for the Arts, Minister for Home Affairs, Minister for Cyber Security, Minister for Immigration and Citizenship and Leader of the House) (14:18): Thank you to the member for Cunningham for raising this issue. The cyber threat landscape is always changing, but the fact that we are under attack is constant. The defence minister just referred to the Annual cyber threat report from the Signals Directorate, where we had 1,500 cyber security incidents last year, an increase of 20 per cent.
This is happening at the same time that artificial intelligence is being used by those who would want to do us harm. We need to remember that artificial intelligence is not creating vulnerabilities. What it's doing is finding vulnerabilities and finding them faster than they would otherwise be found. The gap between a vulnerability existing and it being exploited used to be about 2½ years. It's now 10 hours. Artificial intelligence is supercharging the pace at which these vulnerabilities are being found.
The vulnerabilities continue to exist in three key areas, all of which are being dealt with and addressed in horizon 2 of our cyber strategy. The first deals with legacy technology, and when we talk about legacy technology it's not necessarily old technology. There can be old technology that we don't call legacy because you can keep patching it and you can keep updating it. But any technology or edge device that's not capable of continuing to be updated is legacy and carries risk. The second is the issue of the human firewall. So many cyberattacks involve social engineering where somebody is tricked into opening the doors wide—sometimes an employee, sometimes an individual. The final vulnerability is links that can exist within an entire supply chain.
Just as those who want to do us harm are using artificial intelligence to find and exploit these vulnerabilities, we need the same capability to provide the protection. The change that people will start to see as businesses and government are using the best technology to find vulnerabilities as quickly as possible is that patching of software is going to have to happen and happen fast. We've got used to systems with a whole lot of the businesses that we interact with where you wait for Saturday night, and Saturday night between 2 am and 4 am is when the update occurs. We are going to start to see occasions where sites that we are used to having available for us constantly look like they're shut down for a time. Overwhelmingly, they won't be examples, by and large, of successful attacks. They will be examples of companies taking cyberdefences seriously. We need to use every single edge that is being used against us. Our entire world now—our electricity, our water and every household device—is capable of being connected, and we need to make sure that we have the defences Australians need.
