Published on the 06/05/2014 | Written by Newsdesk

The rapidly rising cost of cyber-crime and the impact that it is having on Australian businesses has proven a clear focus for the start of the Cebit exhibition and conference in Sydney…

The love-hate relationship the Australian Government has with information technology was on display this week in a keynote address delivered at Cebit by Federal Attorney General Senator George Brandis.

Brandis said that although IT was a key enabler of business and all aspects of modern life it was “unfortunately also a key enabler of crime and security threats”. Brandis claimed cybercrime was now costing Australia over $1 billion a year.

In a separate presentation Joe Franzi, assistant secretary cyber security at the Australian Signals Directorate, confirmed that attacks were on the rise, with reports to the Cyber Security Operations Centre up from 1259 in 2011 to 2168 last year. He said mining and resources, energy, defence, technology and financial sector organisations were at greatest risk.

For the general population Attorney General Brandis said that identity theft was a particular problem.

He said that the Government remained committed to its pre-election promise to explore the creation of a service similar to New Zealand’s RealMe which involves the generation of a trusted government issued credential that can be used for identification.

Brandis also outlined plans which will see the extension of the Document Verification Service to more of the private sector. There are presently 23 active private sector users of the service which validates identifying documents to help assure identity, although there are 160 applications to use the service already approved according to Brandis.

Early adopters include telecommunications companies and financial sector businesses. Brandis said that the Federal Government was now working with State and Territory Governments in order to extend access of the DVS service to more private companies suggesting it had applications for e-conveyancing, utilities and organisations which needed to comply with working-with-children regulations.

Brandis delivered the first keynote at Cebit which has relocated this year to Sydney’s Olympic Park precinct. Organisers said it had attracted more than 450 exhibitors from 16 countries – China has brought the largest international contingent – with 30,000 visitors expected to attend the exhibition and 100 forums over the three days.

Cebit’s focus on security continued in a presentation by Tim Morris, assistant commissioner and national manager of the High Tech Crime Operations unit of the Australian Federal Police. Morris said that the main motivation for cybercrime remained financial gain.

However he warned that the rise of cloud computing where data, and hence evidence, was stored internationally in multiple jurisdictions could make it much harder to collect and process evidence related to cybercrime. Morris said that this would place much greater pressure on the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties that Australia had forged with other nations.

He acknowledged that because of the challenges associated with gathering evidence; “Many investigations won’t be worth taking on”.

A lingering problem in Australia is that companies are not mandated to report data breaches. However Morris said that later this year the High Tech Crime Unit would be launching Acorn, an online reporting system to encourage ordinary citizens to report cybercrime related problems, which he said would give a much better idea of the extent of the problem.