IBM – Cyber Law Watch

The Defence Department’s $4 million investment in Cognitive Computing

May 18 2018

By Cameron Abbott and Georgia Mills

The Australian Defence Department granted IBM Australia a $4 million, 3 year contract for the provision of its Watson cognitive computing infrastructure. The platform provides a cognitive, artificial intelligence and machine learning capability for use by Defence and is only the second on-premises instance of Watson globally.

Matt Smorhun, Assistant Secretary for the ICT Strategy Realisation Branch at the Department of Defence said they decided to “just buy this thing” and then work out how it was going to fit into the organisation later. (Which did strike us as a rather strange approach to spending tax payers dollars – but congrats to the IBM sales person who pulled that off!)

ABS blames IBM for Census fail in damning report

Sep 26 2016

By Cameron Abbott and Rebecca Murray

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has blamed the 2016 Census website failure on IBM in a damning Senate inquiry submission. ABS chief statistician David Kalisch said the infrastructure offered by IBM did not adequately prepare for “not unusual” and “anticipated” denial of service attacks on Census night, which ultimately caused the site to be taken down for security reasons. You can read the submission, which was made available online by The Guardian here.

Report finds average cost of data breach reaches $4 million

Jun 20 2016

By Cameron Abbott and Giles Whittaker

A report sponsored by IBM and conducted by the Ponemon Institute found that the average cost of a data breach has grown to $4 million, up 29% from 2013. The survey also found cybersecurity incidents continued to witness growth in both volume and sophistication, with 64% more security incidents reported in 2015 than the preceding year. According to the study, the companies lose $158 per compromised record. Also not surprisingly, breaches in highly regulated industries were even more costly. For instance, healthcare breaches reached $355 per record – a full $100 more than in 2013.

Read the full report conducted by the Ponemon Institute here.

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