GNGB chief executive Michelle Bower said the exercise had become a bellwether for cooperation across the sector on cyber preparedness.
The Gateway Network Governance Body (GNGB) will run its annual Operation Honey Bee, an ecosystem-wide exercise to test how Australia’s superannuation sector responds to a coordinated cyber-attack this month for the fourth time since inception.
“This deep and comprehensive exercise provides an important opportunity to explore realistic cyber threats and practice coordinated response strategies,” Bower said.
This year’s exercise will draw more participants than previous runs, Bower said.
“This year GNGB will host over 50 participants, including 15 superannuation funds, a number of service providers to the super industry including administrators and gateways, the industry’s regulators and a range of industry and government stakeholders,” she said.
GNGB said the exercise’s objectives include evaluating the sector’s collective incident response plans to surface capability gaps and shared risks and testing how organisations share information and intelligence with each other during a live-style incident.
A resilience checklist GNGB from an earlier iteration of Operation Honey Bee in 2024 urged funds to treat third parties as stakeholders in their own response plans rather than notifying them only after a decision is made.
It also warned against taking extortion or data theft claims at face value, recommending formal threat verification before organisations act on an attacker’s claims.
GNGB is an industry-owned, not-for-profit body, established in 2016 by the superannuation industry, gateway operators and software providers.
It took over a network stewardship role the Australian Taxation Office previously held and now governs the Superannuation Transaction Network (STN), the SuperStream data messaging network that carries contributions and rollovers between employers, super funds and the tax office.
The ATO is not a GNGB member and sits on the network as an observer only.
Australia’s compulsory retirement savings system holds more than $4.5 trillion in assets, GNGB said, and ranks among the fastest-growing pension systems in the world.
