Is Australia Sleepwalking Towards a Cyber Crisis?

Posted: Wednesday, Jun 03

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Is Australia Sleepwalking Towards a Cyber Crisis?

Karissa Breen, more commonly known as KB, is crowned a LinkedIn ‘Top Voice in Technology’, and widely recognised across the global cybersecurity industry. A serial entrepreneur, she is the co-founder of the TMFE Group, a portfolio of cybersecurity-focused businesses spanning an industry-leading media platform, a specialist marketing agency, a content production studio, and the executive headhunting firm, MercSec. Now based in the United States, KB oversees US editorial operations and leads the expansion of the group’s media footprint across North America, while maintaining a strong presence in Australia, and the broader global market. She is the former Producer and Host of the streaming show 2Fa.tv, and currently sits at the helm of journalism for the group’s flagship arm, KBI.Media, the independent cybersecurity media company. As a cybersecurity investigative journalist, KB hosts her globally-renowned podcast, KBKast, where she interviews leading cybersecurity practitioners, CISOs, government officials including heads-of-state, and industry pioneers from around the world. The podcast has been downloaded in over 65 countries with more than 400,000 global downloads, influencing billions of dollars in cybersecurity budgets. KB is known for asking the hard questions and extracting real, commercially relevant insights. Her approach provides an uncoloured, strategic lens on the evolving cybersecurity landscape, demystifying complex security issues and translating them into practical intelligence for executives navigating risk, regulation, and rapid technological change.

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Is Australia Sleepwalking Towards a Cyber Crisis?

From Karissa Breen

Australia’s growing reliance on connected technology could leave the country dangerously vulnerable during a major cyber incident, with former intelligence and cybersecurity leaders warning the nation is unprepared for large scale disruption.

Speaking at the Atmos Sphere 2026 event in Sydney, former NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers, now on the Global Advisory Board at CyberCX and Alastair MacGibbon, Independent Advisor, said Australia’s biggest cyber threat may no longer be just stolen data, but the collapse of essential services and public trust.

“We really need to worry about the availability piece and possibly even more so the integrity piece,” MacGibbon said. “What if you can’t use the machines and the data and your society? It’s not just an event, it actually starts crippling society.”

Rogers shared the downstream consequences of cyber disruption could quickly spiral beyond technical outages into societal instability.

“A combination of disruption of service or capability combined with panic or the civil dynamic of that,” Rogers said. “It’s not just the disruption itself, it’s not just the loss of service and capability, it’s one of the societal impacts with that.”

The pair illustrated how modern societies are built around efficiency, global supply chains and digital dependency, have become fragile.

“We’re super efficient, which means our resilience is way less than it would have been a generation ago,” MacGibbon said. “Because we rely on technology, the inevitable interruption of those technologies leads to much greater societal impact.”

The warnings are amongst the concerns globally over attacks targeting critical infrastructure, supply chains and essential services. Rogers pointed to recent cyber incidents impacting major companies overseas as evidence that modern attacks no longer need to cripple entire sectors to have national economic consequences.

“What we’re seeing is narrower but deeper,” Rogers said, referencing incidents involving Jaguar Land Rover and Marks & Spencer in the UK. “Two companies… but that had impact significant on GDP.”

MacGibbon said Australians have become accustomed to uninterrupted access to services, making the country potentially vulnerable when systems fail unexpectedly.

“We’ve been so stunningly successful at cost out, at exposing ourselves to global supply chains,” he said. “Brilliant when it all works. Got some big implications when it doesn’t.”

He cautioned that Australians may underestimate how quickly disruption could escalate.

“You hit a pebble on the road, we’ve seen how people will react when they can’t get that choice and the service instantaneously available,” MacGibbon said.

A question around whether Western societies have become too complacent after years of data breaches that failed to produce immediate physical consequences.

“We’ve kind of screwed it up,” MacGibbon said of protecting data. “We’ve lost that game.”

But Rogers added that the bigger concern is not stolen information, its around the operational disruption.

“The thing that I hoped was going to be a bit more of a game changer… was Colonial Pipeline,” Rogers said, referring to the 2021 ransomware attack that disrupted fuel supplies across the US East Coast. “Through a digital act, we lost control and the functionality of the single largest energy conduit in the most densely populated part of the United States.”

Despite the high profile incidents globally, Rogers said governments and industries still appear trapped in archaic cybersecurity thinking.

“Cybersecurity is not getting better, it’s getting worse,” Rogers said. “It’s not because people aren’t working hard. It’s not because people aren’t trying hard. It’s not because we’re not throwing money at the problem. It suggests to me that the approach that we have taken today is not going to be the one that’s going to get us where we need to be.”

He argued that organisations spend too much time trying to prevent every breach instead of preparing for the inevitable disruption.

“How can I create greater resilience rather than spending all my time debating about how do I make sure they never get into my system at all?” Rogers said. “It was much easier to get into a network than it was to defend it.”

MacGibbon also raised concerns about Australia’s growing reliance on foreign made connected technologies embedded across critical infrastructure.

“We have been importing connected devices that are not just manufactured in, but controlled by China,” MacGibbon said. “I think at some point there could be an egregious misuse of that technology.”

While both men acknowledged Australia has made progress in cyber resilience, particularly through stronger collaboration between government and critical infrastructure operators. They beleived the country still faces difficult political and economic trade offs.