Australia’s superannuation industry will put its collective cyber resilience to the test this month, with more than 50 organisations participating in the fourth annual Operation Honey Bee incident response exercise.
The Gateway Network Governance Body (GNGB) is running the exercise with industry partners, bringing together 15 superannuation funds, administrators, gateway providers, regulators, and government and industry stakeholders to respond to a simulated cyber security incident.
GNGB CEO and exercise director Michelle Bower said the annual exercise had become an important measure of the industry’s growing ability to coordinate its response to cyber threats.
“This deep and comprehensive exercise provides an important opportunity to explore realistic cyber threats and practice coordinated response strategies,” Bower said.
“By working together, participants can strengthen the resilience of the superannuation ecosystem and help protect Australians’ retirement savings.”
Australia’s superannuation system holds around $4.5 trillion, making the sector a significant component of the country’s financial infrastructure and an attractive target for cyber criminals.
The exercise will be facilitated by Ashurst Perkins Coie Risk Advisory, with the organisers aiming to test not only individual organisations’ incident response capabilities but also the dependencies between different parts of the superannuation ecosystem.
Ashurst Perkins Coie Risk Advisory’s head of cyber response, John Macpherson, said GNGB’s four years of exercises had contributed to a significant improvement in the sector’s cyber preparedness.
Aware Super’s chief risk officer, Jane Couchman, said the increasing frequency and sophistication of attacks made coordinated exercises increasingly important.
“Understanding our interdependencies, coordinating our responses and assessing threats together makes us all stronger, fortifying Australia’s retirement savings against bad actors,” Couchman said.
Team Super will participate in Operation Honey Bee for the first time this year. CEO Vasyl Nair said collaboration and information sharing were critical to protecting members’ assets.
“Working together as an industry and sharing information is one of the most powerful ways we can collectively safeguard our members’ assets,” Nair said.
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