Steven Cain says cyberattacks are becoming more sophisticated and the business community is trying to understand what more it must do to improve security.
Cybersecurity is one of the highest growth areas of expenditure within the tech budgets for corporates – Coles has doubled its technology spend since demerging from Wesfarmers in 2018 and more than doubled its cybersecurity spend over that that time.
“I think there needs to be clearer definition of who holds what first, and why, and all those types of things and then establish the regulatory framework around it.” Wesfarmers chief executive Rob Scott confirmed after the AGM that across its retail operations, which includes Bunnings and Kmart, they do not store a lot of highly sensitive personal identity information, but rather transaction data like emails and mobile numbers.
Mr Mascarenhas said increasingly companies saw data as valuable assets that they could monetise, so they were holding on to the data for much longer.He added it was vital that companies monitored the data, which in case of a breach, allowed companies to understand what records might have been stolen.