A holistic solution to cyber threat sharing requires enhanced government–industry and industry–
industry engagement. But there is a risk of fragmentation if domestic ISACs and threat sharing
platforms are not integrated with government threat sharing initiatives. We need to enable better
collaboration between government and industry to improve the quantity, quality and speed of
threat sharing.
How the Government will take action
The Australian Government will create a whole-of-economy threat sharing network through
public–private partnerships that facilitate the rapid exchange of threat intelligence.
Under this initiative, the Government will:
1. Share strategic threat intelligence with industry
Industry has critical responsibilities to manage and mitigate cyber risk across the economy.
To help industry respond to cyber threats, the Government will work with business leaders to
facilitate genuine co-leadership on cyber security issues, enabled by improving industry’s access
to strategic threat intelligence. We will establish a coalition of government and industry leaders
under the Executive Cyber Council. The Council will act as a key forum to build cross-sectoral trust
and share strategic threat intelligence, in addition to driving public-private collaboration on other
priority initiatives under the Strategy.
2. Expand tactical and operational threat intelligence sharing
The Government will invest in automated solutions to ensure we maintain visibility of threat
activity across the economy. We will continue to enhance ASD’s existing threat sharing platforms,
co-designed with industry, to ensure that they can absorb expected future growth in the scale of
cyber threat intelligence. This will amplify our ability to generate and share threat intelligence across
the public and private sectors at machine speed, enabling organisations to move quickly to protect
their networks when threats are identified.
The Government will also support industry-industry threat sharing by investing in a Threat Sharing
Acceleration Fund to support the development of sector-specific ISAC in Australia. This fund will help
build industry capabilities for intelligence collection and dissemination. This will be compatible with
ASD’s existing Cyber Threat Information Sharing platform and run knowledge-sharing programs to
exchange best practice between industry members.
The Threat Sharing Acceleration Fund will start with an initial pilot for the health sector.
Australians are rightly concerned about the cyber security of our health system – our hospitals
and general practitioners hold some of the most sensitive data about Australians and their
families. However, the health sector also has one of the lowest cyber maturities across industry.
Through the Threat Sharing Acceleration Fund, the Government will seek to support the cyber
security of Australia’s health sector by helping health providers identify cyber threats and share best
practice. This pilot will focus on building the capability of Australia’s health system to identify threats
and share intelligence between medical service providers.
By facilitating threat sharing between health providers, a Health ISAC will help industry address
critical gaps in the cyber security of our health system. To ensure we develop a unified national
threat picture, this ISAC will be integrated with existing government threat sharing platforms.
To promote uptake of threat sharing, the Government will encourage and incentivise industry to
participate in threat sharing – with a particular focus on organisations most capable of collecting
and sharing threat information at scale, such as critical infrastructure.
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2023–2030 Australian Cyber Security Strategy