This report, written for Australia’s Department of Defense, dives into what the cyber security landscape needs to look like in the future. To do this, the authors first set up a tiered model to represent the main parts of industry that depend a lot on cyber capabilities. Then, the authors focused in on three sectors, healthcare, government, and energy, and analyzed their dependencies on Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to begin to understand the level of risk that is attributed to each of these sectors. They find that although each of these three sectors are attempting to manage cyber security, they still predict that attacks will become harder to detect and avoid in the future because of the increasing interconnectedness of systems and rising maturity of the threats that they will face. They also predict that these attacks will become less obvious over time and will begin to have more long-term effects that are harder to detect. After analyzing the impact of increasing dependency on ICT and the emergence of more advanced threats, the authors came up with these five key areas that are the most vulnerable to new threats: increasing digitization, increasing complexity, increasing outsourcing, lagging security posture, and increasing interconnectedness. Finally, the authors wrap up their report by restating the challenges that Australia will likely face in the coming years in order to provide context as to why Australia is investing in these cyber security measures.
