If the biggest banks in the country are going back to the drawing board on cyber defence, it is worth asking what that means for the rest of us.
The Australian Financial Review reports that cyber security in the age of AI has shot to the top of boardroom discussions at major banks and other financial institutions. When the Commonwealth Bank board meets to sign off on its full-year results, cyber security will be right at the top of the agenda, and its major rivals are expected to do the same at their own board meetings over the coming weeks. The trigger, according to the AFR, is a crop of fast-moving, AI-powered attackers forcing a dramatic rethink of procedures that had barely changed in decades.
Why a bank’s problem is your problem
Banks have dedicated teams and budgets in the millions. Most Sydney businesses have neither, and the attackers are not confining themselves to the big end of town. The Australian Signals Directorate’s latest Annual Cyber Threat Report puts the average self-reported cost of cybercrime at $56,600 per report for a small business, up 14 per cent on the year before. The most commonly reported cybercrimes against Australian businesses are thoroughly unglamorous: email compromise, business email compromise fraud that ends with money going out the door, and identity fraud.
That is the useful lesson here. What AI has mostly changed is not exotic hacking, it is the quality and the volume of the ordinary stuff. A phishing email that once read like an obvious scam now reads like your bookkeeper. A request to update bank details can arrive in clean English, with the right logo and the right names in it.
Three habits that still work
- Verify every payment change by phone, on a number you already had on file, every single time.
- Turn on multi-factor authentication, starting with email. Email is the front door to everything else.
- Agree now on who gets rung when something looks wrong, so nobody has to work that out at 4pm on a Friday.
None of this needs a bank’s budget. It needs the same decision those boards are making: treat it as a business risk before an invoice gets paid into the wrong account, not after.
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