The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) is publishing its annual cyber threat report on 27 October 2026, which details a 20 per cent jump in cyber security incidents the agency was required to respond to in the last financial year, ABC News reported in an exclusive published at 02:00 Perth time (AWST) on 27 October.

ASD director-general Abigail Bradshaw told the ABC that frontier AI models have "redefined" the threat facing Australia and that "with each capability increase, we are likely to see more disruption", which she said could look like websites taken down to be patched, data breaches or service outages.

The ABC reports Ms Bradshaw named the release of frontier models such as Anthropic's Mythos as the defining event of the past year, and said ASD had set up protocols with AI companies, including OpenAI, to act as an "early warning system", which have been shared with all the labs and the Five Eyes agencies.

ASD also described offensive operations to the ABC: according to ASD acting deputy director-general of intelligence Tauri Gregory, ASD operators accessed the back end of the Amadey information-stealing malware operation, found the criminal network had access to 180,000 computers worldwide, including in Australia, and disconnected the Amadey controller from those victims; ASD said it found Amadey hidden in an illegitimate free copy of Photoshop and sold on the dark web for about US$500.

In another operation, ASD told the ABC it was tipped off to the sale of 5 terabytes of data stolen from a business that did not know it had been hacked, and broke in and destroyed the data before it could be sold; Mr Gregory said about 4.8 million files stolen from Australians were destroyed, along with hundreds of thousands of files from other victims.

The ABC reports Ms Bradshaw said replacing vulnerable legacy systems in business and government, and learning to use AI for defence, is now "a matter of urgency".

This desk could not read the report on cyber.gov.au this pass; figures here are as reported by the ABC.