AustCyber has revealed details of 13 out of the 17 projects selected for the second round of its projects fund, first announced in June 2019.
Last year, the Australian government released the $8.5 million in funding to assist the cyber security industry to upskill and expand. On offer was $100,000 to $3 million in matching funds for eligible projects.
“The field of applications for this round of AustCyber’s Projects Fund was highly competitive and covered a wide range of areas of cyber capability,” AustCyber CEO Michelle Price said. “The recipients were selected through a robust process supported by industry experts, who helped us with the tough job of narrowing down which applications would receive funding.”
Projects are addressing six of the 10 sector challenges identified in AustCyber’s Cyber Security Sector Competitiveness Plan 2019.
Three projects build on completed projects from round one, including Quad IQ’s development of an intelligent trust evaluation system to reduce time spent on security vetting; Locii’s platform which fragments, encrypts and shards user biometrics across multiple trusted servers so that no single entity has access to a user’s complete biometric vector; and Fifth Domain's virtualised learning platform that supports individual lab training. Those projects received $300,000, $950,000 and $987,741, respectively.
Locii will deliver its project in partnership with LaavaID, Macquarie Bank, Nu Mobile and the Australian Finance Group (AFG).
Alpha Beta’s interactive heat map of demand and supply for cyber security jobs received industry funding of $610,430 and matching funds from AustCyber.
Two projects are being led by graduates of CyRise’s accelerator program and have female founders. Cynch Security aims to deliver and study the impacts of cyber risk interventions by applying the Cynch Cyber Fitness platform to tailor programs for small or micro businesses, while Serinus Security aims to develop a threat analytics platform focused on insights into safe Wi-Fi areas and identify malicious Wi-Fi trends and behaviours globally.
will provide fly-away kits to a pilot group of regional SMEs and academia so they can access their own classified IT networks on a scalable, multi-tenant service. The Penten initiative had the largest amount of industry funding — $2.2 million — and will be getting $800,000 from AustCyber.
Amplify Intelligence and Gallagher’s cyber safety service will be trialled by 100 small businesses to measure cyber risks derived from critical datasets from both an external and internal view of their risks.
AARNet, which will contribute with $1.2 million and get $555,000 from the fund, is developing a security operations centre service to help institutions monitor, detect and respond to cyber threats. Airlock Digital is commoditising application whitelisting to managed service providers and smaller businesses, building on their existing enterprise-grade product.
Kortek, Telstra and Intellidesign are working together to deliver a highly secure internet of things platform to give stakeholders advanced control over the security and interoperability of their distributed networks through a combination of industrially robust hardware and a programmable operating system that make it possible to securely integrate endpoint devices into any cloud. The industry funding for the project is $1.3 million and it will recieve $926,123 from the federal fund.
Responsight and McGrathNicol are developing a system for forensic data collection, investigations and early warning risk analytics based on behavioural activity profiling; and WorldStack, Penten and TSS Cyber are working together to accelerate joint development of a prototype to address the challenge of data breach detection and bring the solution to market through a customer trial.
The projects fund is a three-year initiative, with the $8.5 million second round of federal funding to be used over the next two years. In total the projects funded by the initiative are worth more than $35 million, according to the government.
“These projects offer a range of innovative, cyber security solutions that will help grow our national cyber security expertise, create more jobs and position Australia as a global leader in this rapidly evolving sector,” minister for industry, science and technology Karen Andrews said.
AustCyber said it will provide information on the other four projects shortly.