In early September, there was good news out of the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC). Its most recent report on notifiable data breaches in Australia showed that notifications from January to June this year had dropped compared to the second half of 2022. At that time, Australia had been rocked by the enormous cyberattacks on Medibank and Optus as well as three separate data breaches that had compromised the private information of millions of Australians.

As many organisations transition to a cloud-first approach, prioritising the use of cloud applications across their operations, network traffic escalates. At the same time, offering work flexibility in all its many guises, including hybrid working, work from home, or work from anywhere is becoming an expected workplace norm. Together, these modern expectations are placing enormous demands on traditional networks built on hub-and-spoke WAN architecture that was never intended to support and secure such network traffic.

Is your organisation still managing security and networking policies across multiple disjointed consoles? For those who have been tasked to design a cloud-first and future-ready security architecture, secure access service edge, or SASE provides a flexible approach to ever-evolving network security.

The rapid adoption of SaaS applications and the growth of flexible working with more of the workforce working remotely, it’s not uncommon for companies to be using multiple management tools to secure and govern access to cloud services.

The discovery of two new advanced Android surveillance ware instances in July serves as a timely reminder for Australian companies to maintain a robust security posture. The surveillance ware, known as WyrmSpy and DragonEgg, have sophisticated data collection and exfiltration capabilities, and can be used to collect a wide range of data from infected devices. Both are attributed to the high-profile, state-sponsored espionage group APT41.