Turnbull quintuples down on cyber security

Mr Turnbull said he was introduced to Cado by TenEleven Ventures, a Silicon Valley-based VC that also backed Kasada. TenEleven has an investment alliance with private equity giant KKR, where Mr Turnbull is a senior adviser.

“Not many politicians have taken as much interest in signals intelligence as I have over the years,” he said, noting that, as prime minister, he established Australia’s first national cyber-security strategy.

“My tech savviness is generally overestimated, though. It’s only even mildly impressive relative to other people in politics,

“But Cado is exactly what I was trying to promote as PM. Now that I’m out of politics and public life I’m in a position to invest and provide a bit of advice occasionally.”

Cado’s Australian co-founder, James Campbell, a former senior officer with the
Australian Signals Directorate now living in London, said he started the company because cyber attacks were increasingly occurring inside cloud services, where they can be harder to detect and much harder to attribute.

Many companies now use “containerised” software hosted by cloud services such as Amazon, allowing them to scale their software systems up and down seamlessly to cope with changing workload.

But the trouble with containers was that, when they are stopped and then restarted as part of that scaling, or if they are stopped in response to a cyber attack, they automatically erase any changes that were made to them while they were running, Mr Campbell said.

That presented a great opportunity for malicious hackers to infiltrate a container, do their dirty work, and then have all evidence of their attack wiped clean when the container stops, making attribution for the cyber attack harder than ever.

Cado’s software gets into cloud systems and containers before evidence is erased, and helps companies and governments find the perpetrators of attacks, he said.

Mr Turnbull said that appealed to him, especially given his experience in state-based attacks.

“If you fire a missile that takes down a power station, people will be able to work out where the missile came from. There’s a lot of evidence. The perpetrators would struggle to get away with denying it,” he said.

“But cyber attacks are hard. If you couple talented computer hackers with the scale and resources of a nation state, attribution can be a very formidable challenge.

“That’s where you need the best minds and the best forensic tools, and that’s what excited me about Cado.”