ASD Warns AI Attacks Will Knock Australian Services Offline
ASD Warns AI Attacks Will Knock Australian Services Offline By Daniel Rao | 27 October 2026 Australia's spies have stopped talking about cyber attacks as a risk and started talking about them as weather. You do not prevent the weather; you prepare for the roof to come off. That is the blunt message inside the Australian Signals Directorate's seventh Annual Cyber Threat Report, released on 26 October, aimed at every boardroom that still treats a cyber incident as a hypothetical. The numbers are ugly enough on their own. The directorate's Australian Cyber Security Centre fielded more than 82,000 cybercrime reports in the 2025-26 financial year — roughly one every six minutes. It responded to 1,524 cyber security incidents, up 20 per cent on the year before and 36 per cent above the level of five years ago. And it issued more than 4,400 notifications to Australian organisations about potentially malicious activity, up almost 80 per cent. But the figure that matters most is...