Research Seminar 2 September 2020

Grace Borsellino: Developing Trust through Corporate Purpose: Lessons from Benefit Corporations

Corporations are increasingly becoming vehicles for achieving positive social and environmental change. Modern society’s evolving expectations in relation to the role that corporations should play within the business community has intensified. The predictably longer-term presence of successful and longstanding corporations means that their voluntary commitment and leadership to social and environmental issues have the power to surpass community’s shorter-term reliance on the political promises made by the government of the day. This paper will draw on the examples of benefit corporations and reinforce the view that corporations are not merely economic entities but are social institutions with significant economic, social and political power.

Thilla Rajaretnam: Data Breach Notification Scheme and consumer data protection: an approach to organisational data security strategies 

The latest statistical information in the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC)’s Notifiable Data Breaches (NDB) Report (January to June 2020), indicate that the top five industry sectors with the highest incidents of a data breach are the health care sector, the finance industry sector including superannuation, the education sector, the insurance industry sector, and the legal, accounting and management services. Data breaches in health care in Australia is growing at a concerning rate with 203 data breaches. Although the financial industry sector is typically more developed in terms of implementing security measures than the other four sectors but when it comes to data security strategies and technology, malicious or criminal attacks were the largest source of data breached in the financial sector where the private details of 92,000 customers’ personal data were compromised. All of the five industry sectors have been targeted by a diverse range of threat actors who are some of the most advanced makes the threat so great that even the smallest breach has the potential for significant impact monetarily, or on market reputation, perception or confidence. It is thus vitally important that security measures are considered holistically and are led and understood by senior management, otherwise, gaps for exploitation can be found by intelligent and experienced actors, supported by an ever-growing arsenal of exploitation technology. The OAIC's Notifiable Data Breaches (NDB) Report (January to June 2020) is a timely reminder for organisations and agencies to review the privacy impact of any business practices that changed in response to COVID-19 and to assess and address any associated privacy risks.  This paper will discuss and evaluate some consumer data protection strategies in place in general and if cybersecurity should be mandated in the critical infrastructure industry sectors.