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.
A cybersecurity incident that stopped a global medical device manufacturer from making or shipping product has ended with operations fully restored. The one clinical workflow it degraded is working again.
An AI agent compromised roughly 30 companies, exfiltrated 3.1TB of data and drafted the ransom demands. Token costs ran between 40 cents and four dollars per victim.
Australian organisations now have a common vocabulary for describing how sensitive their data is. The same scheme sets out what protection each category warrants, and how that expectation travels when data is shared.
AI systems inside Australian and New Zealand organisations are surfacing sensitive information to people who are not cleared to see it. The problem is now the second most common category of AI security incident in the region according to a new report.
Commonwealth agencies would be barred from automating any decision that requires judgement, under a bill now before the House of Representatives. They would also have to publish the rules, weightings and test results behind every high risk system.
National Australia Bank has been removed from the signatory list of an OpenAI open letter on cyber defence, two days after it appeared as the only Australian organisation endorsing the document.
On Monday, the Australian government released draft legislation for the next big overhaul of the Privacy Act. The Privacy Amendment (Personal Data Protection) Bill 2026 is now out for public comment, together with a consultation paper. It is the second instalment (or “tranche”) of privacy reform , and it is the one that matters most.
AI is an accountability issue, not a technology one. Most organisations can say what an AI tool produced. Very few can say what evidence backs that result. As AI moves into everyday decisions, that gap is the real risk, not whether the technology works.
The US is currently considering a new AI ‘kill switch’ law following an agent going rogue and engaging in unauthorised cyber activities. The proposed law would require developers to maintain the ability to slow, suspend or shut down high-risk AI systems.
Shares in Objective Corporation have continued their slide since the firm announced on July 1 that Defence Digital Group would not renew a support agreement running since 1999. The company has since shed about 40 per cent of its value.
