The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) is partnering with the University of New South Wales (UNSW) to develop a $1.6 million cyber-security education centre.

The five-year ‘Security Engineering’ partnership sees both parties work to build industry capacity to address the growing prominence of cyber intrusions, identify theft, malware attacks and other online security-related threats.

The agreement comes on the back of the Turnbull Government’s national Innovation and Science agenda announced yesterday, and the new centre will also seek to alleviate a critical shortage of cyber-security skills available to Australian businesses, CBA said.

CBA’s Chief Information Security and Trust Officer, Ben Heyes, said the bank recognised “a shared responsibility” to secure Australia’s digital economy, as well as the need to foster additional career opportunities for students.

The new cyber-security centre comes alongside a spate of initiatives introduced as a result of the partnership, including:

• A comprehensive applied cyber-security undergraduate curriculum, with the new curriculum to be published openly for sharing under creative commons licensing and made publicly available on the internet as massive open online courses (MOOCs);
• A new security engineering lab for security courses;
• Recruitment of world-class lecturers; and
• Support for new PhD researchers tackling internet security issues and for the tutoring of undergraduate students.

Richard Buckland, associate professor in computer security and cyber-crime at UNSW, said the partnership with CBA will help drive “the pipeline of professionals” needed to support Australia’s growing digital economy.

“We’ve seen a 60 per cent increase in security jobs advertised in the past year, and companies constantly struggle to hire people with up-to-date security skills,” Buckland said.

“This partnership will … build Australia’s capability for teaching security engineering and establish and share an up-to-date curriculum. This is about raising the bar for cyber-security education across the nation.”