Australia’s critical infrastructure is now on the front line of a contest that is playing out both in cyberspace and our surrounding seas and skies. The choices industry makes in the next few years will determine whether we remain merely connected or truly resilient.
The Stakes for Critical Infrastructure
The latest ASD Cyber Threat Report shows that cyber incidents now target Australia’s critical infrastructure at unprecedented levels, accounting for 13 per cent of all malicious attacks. This is not an abstract statistic – they translate into potential disruptions across energy, transport, finance, communications and mining. These are the sectors that underpin Australia’s sovereignty, prosperity and daily way of life.
In his recent address, ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess underscored that cyber espionage and sabotage against critical infrastructure is no longer a hypothetical wartime scenario. It’s a live contest, fuelled by state-sponsored actors who regard Australian networks as high‑value targets. This stands in stark contrast to the lingering complacency in parts of the community that assume the lights will always stay on, fuel will always flow, and data will always be available on demand.
A Threat Surface That Keeps Expanding
Hostile actors are increasingly “living off the land” by exploiting built-in tools and legitimate credentials to blend into normal operations. This behaviour makes them harder to spot and allows them to wait for a moment of maximum leverage. Denial-of-service and DDoS attacks are now appearing in almost a third of incidents against critical infrastructure, alongside phishing and automated reconnaissance across exposed internet-facing systems.
In operational environments, the convergence of IT and OT has expanded the blast radius of a single compromise, particularly as legacy control systems are bridged to corporate networks for monitoring, analytics and remote support. Incidents in Australian mining and manufacturing have already highlighted that many organisations are still taking weeks or months to detect breaches, during which time attackers can exfiltrate data, pivot into OT, or quietly pre‑position for disruption.
How Enterprises Can Fortify Network Perimeters
Meeting the minimum bar on cyber hygiene through employing measures, such as multi-factor authentication, patching, segmentation and continuous monitoring, is now the entry ticket, not the end state. For operators of essential services, the real task is to design networks and processes so that they can withstand, isolate and recover from compromise without cascading failures across safety, production and community services.
That means aggressively retiring or isolating legacy assets, enforcing strict separation between corporate IT and safety‑critical OT, and investing in AI‑assisted detection that can make sense of subtle anomalies in high‑volume telemetry.
In sectors such as energy, oil and gas, transport and utilities, software‑only defences are not enough when the consequence of failure is physical harm, environmental damage or prolonged outages. These environments demand hardware‑enforced one‑way boundaries, such as data diodes, that permit operational data to flow out for monitoring and analytics, while making it physically impossible for malware or command traffic to flow back in.
Owl Cyber Defense’s data diodes and cross‑domain solutions have been proven internationally in high‑consequence environments, providing assured one‑way connectivity between secure OT networks and less-trusted domains. When this globally accredited technology is integrated with GME’s in‑country engineering, secure integration and through‑life support, Australian critical infrastructure operators gain access to government-accredited perimeter controls that are designed, built and supported onshore.
Conclusion
In a world where cyber threats can be routed through any jurisdiction and software supply chains can be tampered with far from Australian shores, a robust sovereign industrial base is no longer a “nice to have” industrial policy objective but rather a core pillar of national security. From secure radios to cyber‑hard perimeter devices, Australian‑owned and controlled capabilities provide government and industry with assured access, transparency of design, and the ability to respond quickly to emerging threats and regulatory requirements.
The path forward will not be defined by government policy alone, nor by individual companies acting in isolation, but by the quality of partnership between policymakers, operators and sovereign technology providers. If Australia embraces local manufacturing, secure‑by‑design products and rigorous, scenario‑tested risk management, critical infrastructure operators will be far better placed to absorb shocks, maintain services and recover rapidly when – not if – they are targeted.
Resilience in this environment is never “done”; it is a rolling commitment to uplift, invest and collaborate across sectors and borders. The organisations that recognise this early, and that align themselves with trusted sovereign partners, will be the ones that keep Australia’s essential services running in the face of growing contest and uncertainty.
