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.
Microsoft 365 Copilot has switched from Anthropic’ s Claude to OpenAI's new GPT-5.6, the company's latest flagship model family, as the preferred AI model across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Copilot Chat and Cowork. The change comes two months after Microsoft made Anthropic's Claude the default model in several of the same applications, and marks the latest shift in an ongoing contest between the two AI labs for position inside Microsoft's productivity platform.
From 1 July 2026, Australia’s expanded Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing regime will extend to a broader range of professions, including lawyers, accountants, real estate agents and other designated non-financial businesses and professions.
Almost half the ICT hardware devices operating across 10 South Australian government agencies qualify as legacy systems, the state's Auditor-General has found. Incomplete asset inventories and inconsistent risk reporting are leaving agencies with reduced visibility of the security risks these systems create.
Data breach notifications hit record highs on both sides of the Tasman in 2025, with regulators in Australia and New Zealand both pointing to cyber attacks and vendor security gaps as the common thread.
Boards need to treat the deployment of agentic AI as a delegation decision rather than a technology purchase, according to a new white paper from the Governance Institute of Australia. Unlike generative AI, which produces outputs for human review, agentic AI systems act on those outputs directly, transacting with customers and executing multi-step workflows with limited human oversight.
Eighty-seven per cent of Australian Government agencies now use artificial intelligence, but only 15 per cent apply it to information management activities and just 8 per cent use it to create metadata, according to the National Archives of Australia's latest Check-up survey.
Most healthcare encounters in Australia happen in general practice and other primary care settings. Yet this data has historically been excluded from comprehensive, nationally consistent collections, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare's flagship Australia's Health 2026 report.
Victorian government departments have made limited, and in some cases no, progress fixing shortcomings in the state's digital services platform identified five years ago. They also gave the Auditor-General inaccurate reports about the status of their remediation work.
The share of organisations unable to tell whether employees are using unsanctioned AI tools has nearly tripled in a year, rising from 6.3 per cent to 17.6 per cent. For AI agents the blind spot is larger still, with 21.1 per cent of organisations unable to account for unsanctioned agent activity.
Ancestry.com, the world's largest online family history platform, has cut a record digitisation process that once took nine months of manual indexing down to under nine days, using proprietary handwriting-recognition AI to help push its collection past 71 billion records and restore subscription revenue growth after years of stagnation.
