With the new financial year approaching, Australian organisations face a pressing imperative to strengthen their cyber defences and heighten their vigilance against cyberwarfare.

Modern cyberwarfare is marked by a surge in state-sponsored attacks, the weaponisation of artificial intelligence, and a growing emphasis on targeting critical infrastructure amid rising geopolitical tensions. Recent Armis research shows 9 out of 10 (92%) of Australian IT leaders are concerned about the impact of cyberwarfare on their organisation. Over half (51%) have experienced more threat activity on their network in the past six months.

The use of AI is further accelerating the capabilities of threat actors, making cyberattacks faster and more sophisticated. 74% of Australian businesses believe that AI-powered attacks pose a significant threat to their organisation’s security.

AI-Enhanced Attacks

The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) recently revealed that nation-states persistently attempt to infiltrate and probe Australia’s critical infrastructure networks, likely preparing for future access by embedding malware or maintaining system footholds.

Nation-state cyberattacks, which are advanced persistent threats (APTs), remain a challenge because of how well-resourced our adversaries are compared to the average cybersecurity team. APTs only need to find one weak point, such as a vulnerable asset or exposed credentials, but cybersecurity teams triage hundreds of alerts.

AI-enabled attacks have the potential to be more adaptive, evasive and impactful than the last generation of attacks. AI models can be trained to scan for specific vulnerabilities or unleashed on a single target to identify their weaknesses. AI can even automatically execute attacks when it finds vulnerabilities, without the need for human intervention. It is capable of evading detection, by automating the development of malware to dynamically generate code.

Cyber resilience demands proactive exposure management

Traditional security approaches that are reactive, fragmented, and blind to vast portions of the attack surface are no longer sufficient. Organisations need to shift their security investments left of boom to lift their resilience against AI-powered cyberwarfare.

True cyber resilience begins with complete awareness across IT, OT, IoT, IoMT, cloud environments and building management systems. It’s more than just discovering assets and creating an asset inventory; it’s also understanding how they are connected and if they are vulnerable in order to prioritise and remediate risks.

AI-enabled cybersecurity can identify blind spots, discover vulnerable assets, automate threat hunting and even reconfigure security settings in real-time to respond to threats before they cause disruption.

Here are some key considerations for organisations to mount their defence against the rising threat of cyberwarfare attacks:

• Shift from reactive to proactive security – Implement predictive AI models, early warning systems, and real-time anomaly detection to pre-empt threats across IT, OT, and IoT environments be they virtual or cloud based.

• Invest in AI-driven threat intelligence – Organisations need visibility into emerging threats across both the surface and dark web. AI can provide continuous monitoring, adaptive risk assessments, and automated response mechanisms in ways that traditional security simply cannot match.

• Close the AI expertise gap – Upskilling teams, leveraging AI-driven security platforms and automating threat hunting across all asset types must be top priorities.

• Adopt a Zero Trust approach – With AI enabling increasingly sophisticated identity-based attacks, Zero Trust architectures—where no user, device, or application is inherently trusted—are an absolute must.

Cyberwarfare is a fundamental business risk and needs to be evaluated and addressed by organisations heading into a new FY, especially in today’s uncertain geopolitical climate. Organisations that fail to evolve beyond static exposure management will not only suffer financial losses but risk becoming collateral damage in an era of digital conflict.