Industry Insider

  • A Critical Flaw affecting 70% of all Websites has the Cybersecurity World Panicked

    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.

  • Sites go Dark as Agencies Chase PHP Flaw

    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.

  • Stolen Backup Credential Opened Hundreds of M365 Tenants

    Attackers have used a stolen credential from a Microsoft 365 backup service to sign in to hundreds of customer tenants. Because backup tools need broad access to mail, files and directories, the attackers inherited that access.

  • Essential Eight Out, ASD Essentials In

    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 Chair Says Breach Risk Has Not Passed

    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.

Information & Data Manager

Home Affairs Orders Legacy IT Stocktake

A purge of legacy systems across Australia’s federal government would likely cost billions and remains unlikely. Still, the OpenAI Medicare breach has prompted an immediate stocktake of the outdated technology agencies run.

Compliance Notices Follow NZ Health Breach

New Zealand's Privacy Commissioner has used compliance notices to dictate how a health agency must vet, contract with and monitor providers holding patient data. The move follows a breach affecting around 99,416 people.

Suncorp Goes Live With Content AI

Suncorp is projecting annual savings of 68,000 hours of manual effort after using AI to classify and name workers compensation claim documents. Daily document naming corrections have fallen by around 45%.

What Makes an FOI Workload Claim Stick

FOI refusals on workload grounds are more likely to hold up when the agency's estimate is itemised, sampled and tied to the records' real complexity. That is the lesson of 'BBP' and Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (Freedom of Information) [2026] AICmr 74, according to law firm Holding Redlich.

A Third Way Between Private and Public AI

Australian AI cloud provider Sharon AI plans to host frontier AI models onshore, next to customers' sensitive data. It will use a new confidential computing capability from VAST Data.

The year AI agents went rogue

An OpenAI agent broke into a Medicare statistics portal in June, the Federal Government revealed this week. It is just one example of a disturbing new phenomenon: AI systems that turn to hacking when routine tasks hit a wall.