The Australian Cyber ​​Network (ACN), a new not-for-profit organization focused on growing and maturing the industry, was launched today (October 9) in Canberra.

With cybercrime on the rise and the country facing an expected shortfall of more than 80,000 workers in the cybersecurity sector by 2030, ACN aims to address this challenge through education, strengthening capacities and advocacy.

Cyber ​​Daily had the chance to sit down with ACN co-founder and CEO Linda Cavanagh and co-founder and president Jason Murrell (both pictured) to talk about their motivations for the new organization, what happened before, and why generational skills development is important.

While AustCyber ​​was on the verge of winding down operations, its contract expiring in June and it was then in the hands of Sydney-based start-up Stone & Chalk – which Murrell said did not is not a cybersecurity company – Cavanagh and Murrell both wanted to do more with the AustCyber ​​mission and were put in touch through a colleague.

“It was funny, Linda and I both had a mutual acquaintance, Kathleen, who worked with both of us, I think, at AustCyber,” Murrell said.

“And I had sort of said to Kathleen, ‘What’s going on?’ I would love to try to revive that. And she said, “I talked to Linda, and Linda wants to do the same thing” – why don’t we talk together and see what you can do, and the stars couldn’t have been better aligned. .”

Murrell worked at CyberAware when it started and saw several other companies pop up around the same time, but he believes there hasn’t been much movement in the industry since then.

“What happens is… We always say it’s easy to start a business. That’s the easy part,” Murrell said.

“The hardest part is when you really have to scale, find the right customer base, pivot and do all the different things, like venture capital funding, and a lot of those things just weren’t happening. »

According to Murrell, many cybersecurity companies are “technically good at doing business, but they don’t know how to run a business, or how to market or sell or do those kinds of things.”

Another goal of the ACN is to create a single entity that brings together many different use cases, without efforts being completely siled.

“The government was saying, ‘Hey, AustCyber, can you take care of this work,’ and often they should have been talking about other work and, within the community, collaborating more,” Murrell said.

“And what was happening is that it tended to be outsourced to one or a few entities, whereas what Linda and I see is that there are more opportunities to say, ‘Here’s a work that needs to be solved, that cannot be solved by one company alone.

“We look at this as an overview of the industry,” Murrell said.

He believes there is a place for an industry body closer to the SES, which can “step in and actually help and assist in what needs to be done”.

The AED also wants to focus on education as a key area by breaking down and hopefully simplifying the pathways between education and employment. According to Cavanagh, there is “a whole range of opportunities”.

“Part of what we want to do is bring together education professionals, which includes government and all industry bodies,” Cavanagh said.

“We actually need to look at the professionalization of this industry, not only from a regulatory standpoint, but also from an education standpoint.”

For Cavanagh, it’s about balancing people’s expectations when wanting to get into the industry and getting the right people through the door.

“There are people who have good experience in ICT, but who just need a little bit of upskilling in cybersecurity. So, what is the basic threshold that the industry actually needs to have an effective and efficient cybersecurity professional before jumping into the field? a particular discipline,” Cavanagh said.

On the other hand, as Cavanagh pointed out, you could ask someone else to take “a Cert 4 in cybersecurity and expect them to do penetration testing.”

“So there are a whole host of issues around education that we really need to address for industry and for government,” Cavanagh said.

Solving this educational puzzle, however, is only one of the challenges facing the AED and its team. We asked, perhaps optimistically, Murrell what he thinks is the number one challenge facing the industry today. He couldn’t choose just one, but he wants to take them all on.

“Well, there are several,” Murrell said. “Unfortunately, that leaves a lot of questions.”

On the start-up side, gaining trust is a real challenge.

“Coming from a start-up, getting purchases in your own country is very difficult, isn’t it? So, and generally, to gain traction in the market, you need to have the trust of a major brand, whether government, state or federal, or at the board level, [or] big companies that most people know the insignia of,” Murrell said.

“Going into these kinds of environments where your service may be needed and used but is rarely reliable…That’s the hard part. »

Part of the problem is that we are often suspicious of Australian successes, especially compared to other countries, such as the United States.

“The tall poppy syndrome, in some ways, is alive and well,” Murrell said.

“You know, if you start having too much success here… And to be successful, really, you have to be overseas. That’s a problem, isn’t it?

Another problem is that Australians, in Murrell’s view, are far too trusting, which is why we are prone to falling for scams and other criminal schemes.

“I think we get ripped off a lot because of the attitude of ‘She’ll be right, buddy,’ and ‘It won’t happen to me, and I don’t have to worry about that,'” said Murrell.

“Actually, it’s because we’re very friendly, so if someone asks us to do something, we’re more likely to say yes than any other country in the world. So I think, you know, we need to start this education process much earlier, you know.

But for Murrell and Cavanagh, starting cybersecurity education earlier is also a professional challenge.

“We teach kids to brush their teeth and put on their seat belts, but we don’t do anything there,” Murrell said.

“And if we teach cyber earlier, it opens up a career path that they are now technically proficient in.”

For Cavanagh, getting the industry to work together to help the entire nation is the ACN’s true primary goal.

“Our goal is to bring together the best minds, from start-ups to established businesses, to build a cybersecurity network that reflects the real challenges and opportunities in Australia,” Cavanagh said.