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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2023-10-18 Daily Xml
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Super SA Cybersecurity Incident

Mr COWDREY (Colton) (14:09): My question is to the Treasurer. Has a cybersecurity incident occurred at Super SA?

The Hon. S.C. MULLIGHAN (Lee—Treasurer) (14:09): Yes, it has. I was advised late last week that an external—

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order! The Treasurer has the call.

The Hon. A. Koutsantonis: Calm down.

The SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. S.C. MULLIGHAN: Yes, I am aware of a situation where a service provider to a number of government agencies—including but not limited to Super SA—had its cybersecurity breached and data was taken from that firm.

I understood that that breach happened affecting—and I am happy to provide the details to the member—a number of agencies, as I have said, beyond Super SA. My first thought was and remains in these situations whether people who may have been impacted have been alerted to this occurrence and, in the event that they are being alerted, are they given the appropriate information about what this means for them and whether any remedial action needs to be taken and how remedial action is to be taken.

I remain extremely disappointed, as some of us I know in this place, as well as many thousands of others South Australians, have been impacted by these situations in the past. These cybersecurity breaches can be extraordinarily damaging to individuals' and businesses' capacity to go about their normal daily lives, including, for example, the very significant breach that happened a number of years ago—involving, again, an external party to government, Frontier—which impacted I think more than 80,000 staff records across the public sector.

Several thousand impacted people still remain, to different extents, locked out of some of their personal accounts, for example, provided by federal government agencies. I know this too well because I happen to be one of them as one of the people impacted by it. For me, the impact is mostly frustrating; for others, the impact is actually quite significantly damaging to their capacity to go about not only their normal daily lives but sometimes their livelihoods.

What it demonstrates I think to all of us is that not only external providers of services to government but government agencies need to do a much better job of, firstly, trying to insulate themselves as best they can against these attacks in the first place and, secondly, responding to them in a timely, thorough and appropriate way. I have to say in response to the member for Colton's question that I am not convinced that the response from government agencies—let alone from the external third-party provider here—has been timely, has been thorough and has been casting a mind as quickly as it should to the impacts to be borne by people who might be impacted by it.

It's simply not good enough. This is not the first time this has happened in government—it's happened under the previous government and it's happened under this government. The way in which government responds to this needs to improve because, on these sorts of occasions, it is letting thousands, sometimes many thousands, of South Australians down and that is simply not good enough.

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