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For over two decades, BPAY has been trusted by millions of customers to securely handle electronic bill payments for over 45,000 companies.
BPAY Group works closely with Pure Security (now part of Tesserent, Australia’s largest cybersecurity company), to ensure systems are safe, reliable, and ready to defend against new threats as they emerge.
Operating in the financial services sector, BPAY Group maintains a keen eye on its compliance obligations. But the company also wanted to understand the scale of the threats it didn’t know about. Mr Trevor Cushen, the Head of Security, IT Risk and Governance at BPAY Group explains, “The problem we wanted to solve with threat intelligence was what don’t we know and what can’t we see. We can monitor our own environment, but we can't monitor the social media or the dark web application testing where BPAY Group and its customers might be a potential target”.
The Problem: Measuring the Scale of the Unknown
The BPAY Group engagement with Tesserent began in 2017, with the delivery of penetration testing services as part of the company’s compliance obligations. That remit quickly expanded to include Threat Intelligence Services. With such a huge amount of potentially important threat intelligence data available, Mr Cushen and his team needed expert help to determine the scale of its unknown cyber risk.
“We were getting a lot of information that wasn’t relevant and the overhead of trying to filter that information was a time-consuming challenge. Tesserent is the only cybersecurity firm in Australia we found that can give us information fast, in a form we can easily digest and respond to quickly,” he enthuses.
The Solution: Threat Intelligence
BPAY Group understood they needed to improve their threat intelligence capability. Following an extensive market review, which involved looking at a variety of different providers and services, Mr Cushen narrowed the field down to two options. “Tesserent was the standout, being able to provide the level of information we need,” he says.
Unlike other service providers, Mr Cushen reports working with Tesserent is not transactional, where he can only choose from a set menu of services. BPAY Group and Tesserent work together collaboratively to understand requirements and ensure the right people with the right specialist skills are deployed to maximum benefit. Brainstorming and ideation are key to designing effective approaches.
As well as Threat Intelligence Services,
Tesserent works with BPAY Group to deliver
penetration testing and security development
training. BPAY Group’s software developers
work side-by-side with Tesserent’s experts to
ensure the code they write and deploy is
created with a ‘security first’ mindset.
It's an open dialogue and true partnership, working together to protect our business and our valuable customers.
From Cybersecurity to the Boardroom – Everyone Wins
“Having Tesserent’s trained eye monitoring and delivering threat intelligence in a form that is accessible to the business has been critical,” reports Mr Cushen.
This has given BPAY Group’s C-Suite and board greater confidence when launching major public-facing initiatives such as a recent charity campaign to support drought relief for farmers and being involved in major projects such as the launch of the Osko® payments platform.
“I think the biggest benefit for our business is the assurance threat intelligence provides. Before we had threat intelligence, we would put ourselves out there and potentially attract people keen to abuse the system. We didn't have any visibility of that at all. Now, from a security point of view, we're looking for the negative and we guard against fraud by doing so”, says Mr Cushen.
“It's crucial for the CEO to be able to report this information to the board with a high level of confidence that our security team is not just doing the tick box exercises. They are thinking outside the square and mitigating risks that haven’t even appeared yet and stopping them at the source,” he says.
Another significant benefit, says Mr Cushen, is that the reports he receives from Tesserent enable him to be very targeted when producing his annual budget. The information allows him to confidently allocate resources where they will have the most effect.
Tesserent’s threat intelligence services allow BPAY Group to always stay one step ahead of cyber criminals. By working as a trusted partner, Tesserent ensures everyone, from developers to the boardroom, understands what threats they are facing so they can proactively defend the business and protect customers.
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