Organisations now have days, and sometimes only hours, to patch new vulnerabilities before AI-assisted attackers exploit them, Australia's cyber security agency has warned.
Data breaches big enough to touch a million people stopped being rare events in 2025-26. Australia's privacy regulator recorded 15 of them, up from just two the year before.
Asking a person to approve sensitive actions is no longer a reliable safeguard for AI agents, according to new research from Microsoft. Its red team found poisoned agent memory can suppress or bypass those checks.
Half of all organisations will use AI agents with minimal human involvement in IT operations by 2030, up from almost none this year, Gartner predicts. The forecast is one of five trends in Gartner's Top AI Trends in Infrastructure and IT Operations for 2027.
An AI planning assistant used by New South Wales councils has handled more than 16,500 resident conversations in nine months. About a third took place outside council counter hours.
UNSW Sydney will retire 11 legacy research storage systems and replace them with a single environment that moves data automatically between fast and cheap storage. The university has selected US storage company DDN as prime contractor after an 18-month evaluation. Melbourne-founded Arcitecta will supply the data management layer.
Updating WordPress, Drupal or a plugin will not close the PHP flaws that took government websites offline this week. The vulnerable code sits in the PHP engine underneath them, so every server, appliance and hosting platform running PHP has to be found and updated.
Details have been published of a critical flaw in the programming language PHP, which is the backbone of more than 70% of all websites. Left unfixed, the flaw would allow hackers to easily take over and compromise millions of websites and the information held on their servers. In response, multiple European governments and operators including the Port of Rotterdam have taken websites offline.
Australian organisations will no longer be able to summarise their cyber security posture with a single Essential Eight maturity level. The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) has released a principles-based replacement that rates security area by area.
Origin Energy has seen no evidence that customer data taken in its July cyber incident has been published online, but chairman Scott Perkins has told shareholders the risk remains and affected customers must stay alert to scams.
Financial services licensees are answerable for the cyber resilience of their authorised representatives, not just their own systems. Fortnum Private Wealth has been ordered to pay a $A1.35 million penalty for failing to manage cyber risk across its advice network.
The password "123456" has let an attacker into Denmark's national population register resulting in names, addresses and ID numbers for about 8.8 million people being exposed.
Tracking who and what can reach sensitive files is about to sit inside one of the largest email and human-risk security platforms. Proofpoint has agreed to buy Varonis for about $US6.3 billion as AI agents gain broad access to corporate data.
Sixty per cent of Australian workers have personally spotted an error made by an AI tool at work. Almost half say the most significant error they saw had consequences beyond minor inconvenience, including financial, compliance or reputational impact.
Copilot will be able to read, organise and change files on Windows PCs with user permission, under a Microsoft plan to split AI work between the device and the cloud.
An internal AI agent at Bunnings has saved staff half a million hours of administrative work, according to Google, as parent company Wesfarmers deploys agents across its retail portfolio. The figure was cited at Google Cloud's Gemini at Work 2026 event, where the company announced the Gemini agent, a single agent for knowledge work, content creation and coding.
The NSW Audit Office is building a central platform to collect general ledger, journal and payroll data directly from state agencies. Around 180 agencies are due to be onboarded by 30 June 2027.
