Page 40 - Australian Defence Magazine May 2022

40 DEFENCE BUSINESS MILCIS 2021
MAY 2022 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
He said Australian industry offered huge opportunities. “Army will not always go to fight only with Five Eyes pow- ers. We will in the region almost always have our regional partners along the way with us,” he said.
“ITAR heavily constrains our ability to achieve some of the interoperability requirement we have with those partners.”
COL King said the C4 EDGE program – where an indus- try consortium demonstrated their ability to
deliver a secure tactical battlefield communi-
cations system – showed that Australian in-
CYBER SECURITY
With global tensions rising as Russia prepared to launch its invasion of Ukraine at MilCIS 2021, online activity and es- pionage by state-based actors had soared, said Head of the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) Abigail Bradshaw.
Ms Bradshaw told the conference that ACSC had ob- served a sharp rise in cyber-criminal activity with the onset
of the COVID pandemic.
In the same period, ACSC had observed
state-based actors targeting all levels of gov- ernment, private organisations and industry. “There is a general trend which we observe and that is when global tensions rise, when there is power conflict, when there is scepticism or uncer- tainty about what will happen next, state-based
dustry was more than capable of stepping up. Rob Doughty, assistant secretary for ICT architecture within CIOG said the threat landscape was ever evolving and the risk
continued to escalate.
“How we protect against exploitation by
adversaries and nefarious actors is a real risk and therefore should be at the heart of everything we do,” he said.
He added all that provided a foundation for moving to a zero-trust network, which takes the approach of ‘never trust, always verify’. All networks, no matter the location, are al- ways assumed to be hostile and monitored continuously.
“This is a fundamental change in approach to security,” he said.
actors and espionage all increase,” she said.
Ms Bradshaw said that was because state-based actors were trying to obtain as much information as possible to
reduce the uncertainty about what is happening next. ■
ABOVE: A modest trade exhibition accompanied the workshops and keynote presentations at MilCIS 2021
“THIS IS A FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE IN APPROACH TO SECURITY”
CONSEC