Victor Dominello
The NSW government is set to quadruple the size of its cyber security team with an injection of $60 million over the next three years.
Minister for Customer Service Victor Dominello said the spending would be used to “create an army of cyber experts,” which would allow the scope of Cyber Security NSW to expand to include small agencies and councils.
The office was launched in May 2019 to protect the state government’s digital systems from threats and works alongside the Information and Privacy Commission on security, privacy and the availability of systems and services.
“The $60 million is not only a four-fold increase in spending on cyber security but allows Cyber Security NSW to quadruple the size of its team in the battle against cyber-crime,” Dominello said.
“Cyber Security NSW will train the next generation of cyber security experts and ensure there is a cross-government coordinated response, including advance threat intelligence sharing, cyber security training and capability development.”
The funding is part of the state’s $240 million investment into cyber security, which comes from an overall pool of the $1.6 billion Digital Restart fund, which was announced in June.
Acting chief cyber security officer Charlotte Wood added that the announcement stressed the need to increase cyber security capabilities across the whole state.
“Councils provide us all with important online services and we must ensure the capability of councils is increasing at the same time as NSW Government’s capability is increasing.”
The $60 million in funding follows the July opening of the Bathurst-based Cyber Security Vulnerability Management Centre, which is operated by the office.
It’s also the latest move overall from the state government to flag technology spending as a focus, coming off the back of the July announcement of the ICT and Digital Sovereign Procurement Taskforce to create more diversity of digital and ICT suppliers and service providers to the NSW government.
