- The Australian Signals Directorate responded to more than 1,500 cyber security incidents in 2025-26 and issued over 4,400 threat notifications, up almost 80%.
- Director-General Abigail Bradshaw said each jump in AI capability is likely to bring more disruption, from data breaches to service outages.
- The report cites sanctions on Russian ransomware host Media Land and urges a move to post-quantum cryptography by the end of 2030.
Australians should prepare for essential online services to go down unexpectedly as artificial intelligence speeds up cyberattacks, the Australian Signals Directorate warned as it released its annual threat report on Tuesday.
The agency’s Australian Cyber Security Centre responded to more than 1,500 cyber security incidents in the 2025-26 financial year, up more than 20%. It also notified organisations of potential malicious activity more than 4,400 times, almost 80% more than the year before.
ASD director-general Abigail Bradshaw told the ABC that frontier AI models had changed the threat Australia faces.
She said that disruption could take the form of data breaches, service outages or websites pulled offline to be patched. Government websites, including ASD’s own, were partly taken down last week after critical flaws in the PHP programming language were disclosed.
Bradshaw and Defence Minister Richard Marles said organisations should put system security ahead of keeping services online, according to The Guardian.
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AI Speeds Up Both Sides
AI was the defining force in the threat landscape over the past year, Marles wrote in the report’s foreword. He said it let attackers find vulnerabilities faster and exploit them at unprecedented scale. In recent weeks, new threats had also come from the unintended actions of AI agents and model testing, he wrote.
Bradshaw told the ABC that a breach of government health data by AI agents led ASD to set up early-warning protocols with AI labs, including OpenAI. In that case, an OpenAI agent gained access to a Medicare statistics portal on 18 June.
The report urges organisations to adopt AI tools for their own defence. Those tools can help detect vulnerabilities early, monitor for unusual behaviour and speed up incident response, it says.
Ransomware Hosts and Quantum Deadlines
The ACSC received more than 82,000 cybercrime reports over the year, one every six minutes on average. The average self-reported cost per business report rose 16% to AU$93,500 (US$65,800).
The centre responded to 139 ransomware incidents, about the same as the year before.
Financial and insurance services made up 30% of critical infrastructure incidents, more than any other sector. The report also highlights the sanctions Australia imposed in November 2025 on Russian hosting firms Media Land and ML.Cloud for supplying ransomware infrastructure.
ASD said those attacks hit Australian financial institutions, businesses and their customers. The joint US, UK and Australian sanctions on Media Land also covered a Bitcoin address linked to one of its leaders.
ASD recommends that organisations stop using traditional asymmetric cryptography and move to post-quantum algorithms by the end of 2030, or sooner. Moving by then would leave organisations at lower risk should AI speed up quantum computing, the agency said.
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