June 23, 2023
A senior Air Force commander will become Australia’s first cybersecurity tsar, as the federal government responds to one of the biggest data breaches in the country’s history.
Federal cabinet on Tuesday signed off on the appointment of Air Vice-Marshal Darren Goldie as the government’s first co-ordinator of cybersecurity, according to multiple senior security sources who are not authorised to speak publicly.
Goldie will be backed by a National Office for Cyber Security within the Department of Home Affairs to co-ordinate work across the government to respond to cyber hacks and threats.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil will announce the appointment on Friday after a four-month search for candidates.
The appointment of Goldie comes after a long and distinguished career in the Royal Australian Air Force which he joined in 1993. In his current role Goldie has been responsible for ensuring the Air Force is ready for combat.
The government is responding to a hack attack on Australian law firm HWL Ebsworth, which counts Australia’s four largest banks and government agencies – the Department of Human Services and Medicare – as clients.
The attackers – a Russian-linked criminal gang known as BlackCat, or AlphV – stole extensive data from the law firm in April and claim to have published 1.45 terabytes of its data on the dark web.
Opposition home affairs spokesman James Paterson said the new cybersecurity co-ordinator should have been in place in March, as the government originally promised, before the attack on the law firm.
“The co-ordinator’s first task must be to get to the bottom of what government data has been lost in this attack and be transparent with the public about it, given the Albanese government’s failure to do so,” Paterson said.
Cabinet minister Murray Watt told the Senate on Thursday that the government was working with the law firm to determine the extent of the cyberattack, including the effect on Commonwealth data.
Retired major general Marcus Thompson, a former head of the Australian Defence Force’s information warfare division, said the cyberattack showed the need for the new co-ordinator to reach across government and industry.
“A true national co-ordination function with the authority to direct outcomes amongst government and industry would be a significant step forward,” he said.
The Albanese government is also considering how to respond to a classified Home Affairs review into Chinese social video sharing platform TikTok and other social media companies based in authoritarian states.
The Home Affairs review was handed to O’Neil in March, but the government is still working on a response.
The government is considering rolling the response into the next seven-year cyber security strategy, which is expected to be released around September, according to security sources.
Security agencies including the Australian Signals Directorate and the Australian Cyber Security Centre, which sit within the Defence Department, participated in the TikTok review.
It was ordered by O’Neil last year after leaks revealed that employees of its parent company, ByteDance, had repeatedly accessed data in China.
TikTok was the most downloaded mobile entertainment app in Australia last year and it now has 7.38 million Australian users over the age of 18, according to a report by communications agency We Are Social and social media management firm Hootsuite.
