Building the Next Wiz From Australia: Escaping the Typical Start ups Valley of Death
Australia is at an inflection point. Recent major data breaches have pushed cybersecurity into the headlines, cybercrime is reported roughly every few minutes keeping boards on their toes. The Australian federal government has declared an ambition to be a world leader in cyber by 2030, backed by a multi‑year, multi‑billion‑dollar strategy. The ingredients look promising, ... Read more
Read article
Australia’s Cybersecurity crossroads: Breached, understaffed, and playing catch-up
What do Optus, Medibank, and Latitude Financial all have in common—aside from landing on the front page after massive breaches? They’re symptoms of a deeper national problem: we’re underprepared, underinvested, and increasingly outpaced in the cyber arms race. In the past two years, breaches affecting tens of millions of Australians have become routine. According to ... Read more
Can Security Become a True Business Enabler?
Why it’s time to stop treating cyber security as a cost centre and start treating it as a strategic engine for growth. By Ami Hofman “The goal of cyber security isn’t just protection, its progress.” For too long, cybersecurity has been viewed as the department of ‘no’: no to innovation, no to speed, no to ... Read more
Why Australia (Still) Doesn’t Have Its Cyber Sh*t Together – And How We Fix It
Introduction: Still Dropping the Ball In footy terms, Australia has all the right gear: crisp jerseys, polished boots, well-marked ovals, but every time the cyber security whistle blows, we fumble the ball. Despite dozens of policies, billions in funding, and even a Cyber Security Strategy with a “six-shield model” that sounds like it came from ... Read more
SOAR, So What? The Promise, the Letdown, and What Comes Next
Remember When SOAR Was Going to Save Us? Ah yes—Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR). Once pitched as the cyber equivalent of a self-driving SOC: no more 3am alerts, tier-1 fatigue, or 27-tab pivoting. Just clean, streamlined, playbook-powered bliss. But here we are, a decade in. Most orgs still struggle to scale SOAR. Analysts spend ... Read more
The Future of Cyber Defence: Why Predictive Intelligence Is the Only Sustainable Strategy
Forget chasing malware signatures and IOC whack-a-mole. It’s time to start predicting what’s next, before it hits your front door. By Ami Hofman Let’s start with the uncomfortable truth: the bad guys are faster than us. Threat actors are weaponising zero-days faster than defenders can patch them, social engineering their way past even the most ... Read more
Why do cyberattacks always happen over the holidays?
The unseen seasonality of cyber risk and how to defend against It in 2025 “It’s Boxing Day. Your CISO’s in up in Sunshine coast, your IR lead is camping off-grid and your SOC just lit up like it’s Diwali. Again.” There’s a growing meme in the cybersecurity world: major incidents don’t just happen randomly, they ... Read more
Non-Human Identities: The Silent Saboteur of Digital Transformation
How machine and workload identities have become the soft underbelly of modern enterprise security “It’s not the 10,000 employees you onboarded last year that scare me. It’s the 1.2 million secrets, tokens, and ephemeral compute identities no one tracks.” The hard facts, Machine identities now outnumber human identities 45:1 in cloud-native environments Most orgs lack ... Read more
The Rise of Agentic AI and the Fall of Point-to-Point: Why 2025 Demands a Modular Mindset
“If Agentic AI is the future of enterprise, point-to-point integration is the horse-drawn carriage holding it back.” As enterprises race to embed AI into everything, from customer support to finance, logistics to cybersecurity, one truth is becoming clear: AI agents aren’t just tools. They’re collaborators, decision-makers and in many cases, fully autonomous digital employees. But ... Read more
The CISO Storyteller: Turning Cyber Risk into Boardroom Action
Why mastering narrative is no longer a nice-to-have skill in 2025. “Your 10-slide deck of patch stats just got two minutes at the end of the board meeting. The CFO is checking the phone, the COO is thinking about lunch and the Chair just asked if cyber insurance covers nation-state attacks. You’ve got 120 seconds. ... Read more