"We must bring the reality of the threat to every person in Australia. The risk and costs are too great if we fail.
"Words like malware, denial of service attack or phishing don’t mean very much to the average Australian. But the consequence of those three terms do – you can lose your entire business overnight.
“We must get better at communicating this to the general public. Too many of our companies, and I'm not just talking about mum-and-dad operations, have their heads in the sand about this."
Ignorance is "poor excuse" says Minister
Meanwhile Minister Taylor has said “not knowing how to protect client or customer data is becoming a poor excuse. There is a lot of information now available on cyber security. The onus is with business operators, with organisations and with government agencies, to put measures in place to reduce the risk of data breaches.”
Minister Taylor made the comments to coincide with the passing of a new amendment to our Privacy legislation, which requires mandatory reporting of data breaches.
The Notifiable Data Scheme came into effect on February 22, 2018.
Companies which fail to report data breaches as defined by the new legislation are liable for penalties and fines up to $420,000 for individuals and over $2million a business entity.