A new whitepaper from InPayTech, Keeping Our Money Safe: Data and Security of Payments in 2020 and Beyond, noted that the total Australian retirement savings pool is projected to grow from approximately $2.9 trillion in assets at 30 June 2019 to approximately $4.75 trillion by 2027.

This growth projection, the morphing of “big data” into “mega-data”, the increased use of cloud-based data storage and advances to technological sophistication “will make superannuation funds, employers, pay-tech providers and others in the ecosystem increasingly meaningful and potentially vulnerable targets for identity theft cyber-security breaches and other technologically enabled disruption”, the report said.

It considered that “in a digital world made smaller by technology, our greatest combined challenge is to invest in, design and implement technological solutions that limit the risk of loss, whether by accident or the design of an increasingly sophisticated network of global cyber criminals”.

Calling recent data breaches experienced by Australian superannuation funds “the proverbial canaries in the coal mine”, InPayTech said cyber security is not just a technology or systems issue.

Instead, “it’s a cultural issue involving human psychology, motivation and behaviour”.

Noting the increasing complexities of retirement sector value chains, the white paper said there are now larger volumes of data being transferred and shared between multiple participants, which will increase super fund vulnerabilities to “cyber-security disruption”.

It went on to consider that the relationship between the hacker and a superannuation fund, payroll provider or employer “is an asymmetric one”.

“The hacker only has to be successful once, whereas the other stakeholders must be successful [at keeping hackers out] 100 per cent of the time.”