Transparency key to banks’ cybersecurity strategy

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The latest incarnation of the federal government’s cybersecurity strategy is set to drop this Tuesday, and despite some recent high-profile private sector screw-ups, the chances of the federal government forcing the corporate sector to clean up its backyard look bleakly limited.

It comes as the Department of Home Affairs casts for a new secretary and its hand-picked leader has been recalled. Ouch.

After a broadly pitiful show trial of Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, which saw her hauled before a committee to explain a national outage, few in industry expect a cybersecurity strategy that will make service providers financially liable for outages.

Worse still, the banking sector is unlikely to cop a regime in which they are forced pick up the tab for broader scams and losses.

This is a missed opportunity, not least because it fails to grasp the nettle of letting major institutions transfer the losses of technological laziness back to consumers and business.

The past decade saw major banks in Australia chasing a flaky fintech dream of a perfect coin-operated system. Barriers to entry have been removed, and fees for less profitable boosted.

But the price of the new deal is that consumers will increasingly wear the losses irrespective of how convincing the scam is. This speaks to the broader power of banks to buy off day-to-day disputes.

For every piece of government legislation that is about to be passed, the question remains as to who pays for the lunch.

The reality is that banks and any other industries just don’t change until they have to. That’s OK when public trust is high.

Yet the forthcoming strategy seemingly does little to address basic social issues. Making banks pay their way upfront could be a good start.

Banks’ absurd inability to quantify their actual fraud figures is not a good thing. Let’s see what happens.


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