Page 65 - Australian Defence Magazine April-May 2021

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CYBER OVERVIEW 65
customers in the same way that water utili- ties deliver drinking water to households.
ASPI’s Tom Uren has outlined some of the technologies that could go into a Clean Pipes approach, including positively identifying threats such as spoofed traffic or malware command, preventing users from navigating to sites that host malware and ‘dynamically adjusting’ a blacklist of malicious entities.
Yet there are obstacles. The most obvi- ous is the lack of a regulatory framework to compel ISPs to supply clean internet. ISPs would also need to deploy larger resources to detect threats beyond the scope of their own operations.
“Any individual ISP would be able to iden- tify some threats on its network, but a col- laboration with multiple partners provides a more comprehensive and effective picture of both the threats and effective mitigations,” Uren writes. “Holistically understanding threats requires collaboration with multiple partners in the security ecosystem, includ- ing providers of threat intelligence, other industry verticals and competitor ISPs. Each organisation provides a different slice of the view so that the overall picture is far more complete than any individual organisation can develop on its own.”
Uren also highlights the reputational risk for ISPs: “ISPs still have to strike a balance between providing enhanced security and the risk that false positives will affect ser- vice quality.”
One notable initiative has come from Tel- stra, which used the shift to home working after the beginning of the pandemic to in- troduce cleaner pipes.
“Cleaner Pipes involves significantly upscal- ing our Domain Name System (DNS) filter- ing, where millions of malware communica- tions are being proactively and automatically blocked every week as they try to cross Telstra’s infrastructure,” Telstra CEO Andrew Penn said. “This action reduces the impact of cy- ber threats on millions of Telstra’s customers including stopping the theft of personal data, financial losses, fraudulent activity and users’ computers being infected with malware.
“Cleaner Pipes means we are able to more actively block cyber threats on our network that would compromise the safety of our customers’ personal information. While it will not completely eliminate the risk, or substitute appropriate threat protection, it will contribute to significantly reducing the volumes and impact.”
As one of Australia’s largest companies, Telstra has the financial muscle to clean the
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