AustCyber grants millions to channel players

Federal cyber security advocacy agency AustCyber has handed out millions of dollars to Australian companies to help fund their cyber security projects.

Minister for Industry, Science and technology Karen Andrews announced that 17 projects had been funded as part of the second round of the AustCyber Projects Fund. Only 13 projects where announced, with the remaining four expected to be made public shortly.

Projects receive funding from a consortium of industry members, which AustCyber partially matches. AustCyber will also offer additional funding for marketing successful projects.

Among the funding recipients includes Airlock Digital, which received a combined $1.3 million to deliver commoditised application whitelisting to managed service providers and smaller businesses, an extension of its existing enterprise product.

Alpha Beta scored $1.2 million to develop an interactive heat map for demand and supply of cyber security jobs in states and metro areas.

Canberra-based Tenable partner Penten Services nabbed funding for two projects. The first is worth $3 million to provide fly-away kits to a pilot group of regional SMEs and academia so they can access their classified IT network on a scalable, multi-tenant service.

The other is a joint project with WorldStack and TSS Cyber that received $499,000 to develop a prototype that addresses the challenge of data breach detection and take it to market.

Other funded projects include:

• Australia’s Academic Research Network (AARNET) - $1.85 million to develop a security operations centre
• Amplify Intelligence - $200,000 to create a cyber safety service that measures cyber risks derived from critical datasets
• Cynch Security - $210,000 to deliver and study the impacts of cyber risk interventions with its Cynch Cyber Fitness platform
• Fifth Domain - $1.98 million to develop a learning platform to support individual lab training, collective cyber range exercises and other training initiatives
• Serinus Security - This Melbourne ISV was awarded $535,000 to develop the HackHunter WiFi Threat Analytics Platform which provides insights into safe public WiFi areas
• Kortek - A Queensland IoT developer, Kortek won $2.2 million to develop an IoT platform that gives users control over the security and interoperability of their distributed networks
• Locii - Awarded $1.9 million to develop the trUUth Identity Platform which fragments, encrypts and shards user biometric data across multiple servers
• Quad IQ - $612,000 to develop the Intelligent Trust Evalution System which reduces the time it takes to complete security vetting
• Responsight - $250,000 to develop a system for forensic data collection

Check out the details on all the funding recipients here.