Jennifer Duxbury, compliance, regulatory, and corporate affairs director for Ninemsn, told the Senate panel that the naming of a cybersecurity czar would help coordinate cybersecurity efforts, but it could pose jurisdictional issues.
“If there was to be an [cybersecuirty] ombudsman, one of the challenges would be the fact that a lot of cyber safety issues can be offshore, so there is a jurisdictional challenge there as to how an ombudsman would actually deal with complaints which deal with, for example, inappropriate offshore material”, she was quoted by Computerworld Australia as saying.
Stuart Strathdee, chief security advisor for Microsoft Australia, testified that establishing a cybersecurity czar would contribute to better coordination of existing efforts.
“I think leadership is what’s critical, so we need to get a body or individual in place which demonstrates that they have pulled all of the data together and they are going to focus on two or three key areas and really demonstrate leadership”, he said.
Yahoo!’s legal and policy director, Samantha York, said that having a central cybersecurity point of contract for industry would be helpful.
“I’d like to avoid yet another person being empowered to deal with these issues without addressing the fact there is already a number of disparate work streams taking place. I hope the aim of creating such a role would be to coordinate all those efforts across departments”, she was quoted by Computerworld as saying.