The Gateway Network Governance Body (GNGB), working with industry partners, will host “Operation Honey Bee 2026”, a superannuation cyber security incident response exercise scheduled for this month.
GNGB CEO and Exercise Director Michelle Bower said the exercise, now in its fourth year, was aimed at strengthening cooperation across the superannuation community in preparing for and responding to cyber threats.
“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,” Ms Bower said. “This deep and comprehensive exercise provides an important opportunity to explore realistic cyber threats and practice coordinated response strategies. By working together, participants can strengthen the resilience of the superannuation ecosystem and help protect Australians’ retirement savings.”
The announcement comes as Australia’s superannuation system—estimated at $4.5 trillion—continues to grow, and as cyber risk remains a persistent concern for financial services and critical economic infrastructure.
The exercise will be facilitated by Ashurst Perkins Coie Risk Advisory. John Macpherson, Head of Cyber Response, said GNGB’s leadership over the past four years had contributed to improved preparedness across the ecosystem.
Jane Couchman, chief risk officer at Aware, said the increasing sophistication and frequency of cyber attacks made sector-wide exercises more important. “Prior to Honeybee our industry had not had the opportunity to come together in this way to plan and prepare for potential attacks,” she said. “Understanding our interdependencies, coordinating our responses and assessing threats together makes us all stronger, fortifying Australia’s retirement savings against bad actors.”
Team Super will participate in the exercise for the first time. CEO Vasyl Nair said information sharing across the industry was essential to protecting members’ assets. “Working together as an industry and sharing information is one of the most powerful ways we can collectively safeguard our members’ assets,” he said. “We’re encouraged by the progress GNGB has achieved to date running the cross industry Operation Honeybee exercises, and welcome the opportunity to be part of an initiative that strengthens our collective resilience.”
GNGB said Operation Honey Bee’s objectives include evaluating collective incident response plans through a scenario-based exercise to identify strengths, capability gaps and shared risks, and simulating inter-organisational collaboration and information sharing in response to a significant cyber security incident impacting the sector.
