The Partnership

The Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) Partnership Program enables a wide range of organisations to engage with the ACSC and fellow partners, drawing on collective understanding, experience, skills and capability to lift cyber resilience across the Australian economy. ACSC enables the partnership through the network of Joint Cyber Security Centres (JCSCs), located in Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. JCSC’s are increasingly bringing industry, academia, law enforcement and Federal and State government agencies together in collaborative workspaces, enabling information-sharing and network-hardening across the economy.

Why Now?

Malicious cyber activity against Australia’s national and economic interests is increasing in frequency, scale, and sophistication. While cyber adversaries are becoming more adept, the likelihood and severity of cyber-attacks are also increasing due to the growing dependence on new information technology platforms and interconnected devices and systems. The Higher Education sector faces unique challenges concerning information security and universities are attractive cyber targets and are being targeted more than ever before. Successfully fighting cyber- attacks requires collaboration between public and private sector organisations and JCSCs can provide the scale needed to tackle this challenge.

Role of JCSC

The ACSC runs the partnership program as part of the Australian Government Cyber Security Strategy. The strategy has been implemented to ensure Australian governments – state, territory and federal – and institutions, businesses, and organisations can take full advantage of current and future digital technologies. The community of ACSC partners includes cybersecurity professionals across government, industry, academia and the research sector. Bringing together the situational awareness, technical expertise and experience of this community allow the public and private sectors to support and learn from each other, sharing insights and collaborating on shared threats and opportunities. The JCSCs provide a means for businesses and other stakeholders to access expertise from both ACSC and the broader cyber ecosystem that will help them prevent and recover from cybersecurity incidents and solve common challenges..

Benefits for UNE

Threat Intelligence & Situational Awareness
The ACSC constantly monitors cybersecurity threats from a range of local and global sources, including through government and business computer emergency response teams (CERTs) around the world. As a partner, UNE will have access to threat intelligence consisting of context-rich, actionable and timely information in a variety of formats, including alerts and advisories, technical information and mitigation strategies.UNE will also benefit from this partnership by being better equipped to respond to cybersecurity incidents.

Resilience-building activities
Developing an understanding and awareness of emerging cyber threats faced by similar institutions and organisations from different industry sectors will enable UNE’s cyber security operations staff to respond quickly and effectively during a cyber-incident. Other benefits from this partnership provides UNE to participate in a range of events held by JCSC, which includes:

• Workshops
• Briefings
• Events
• Cybersecurity exercises

Collaboration Opportunities
With the JCSC Slack Workspace, UNE staff members tasked with cybersecurity responsibilities can communicate with the national network of ACSC partners through the ACSC’s online communications platform (JCSC Slack Workspace).