Australia's ASD annual threat report names AI the 'defining force' in the cyber landscape as notifications of malicious activity rise 80%

Frontier models have reset the threat baseline

ASD director-general Abigail Bradshaw said frontier models had 'redefined' the threat and named the arrival of Anthropic's Mythos as the defining event of the year. The report records that AI tools became more accessible through a new generation of frontier models, raising the speed and scale of attacks by criminals and states alike. Most recently, the response to a critical PHP flaw discovered using an OpenAI model forced parts of government websites, including ASD's own, offline for patching. Bradshaw said that 'with each capability increase, we are likely to see more disruption' and urged businesses to plan for service outages.

The report also characterises the September attack on the Medicare website by a swarm of AI agents as the first autonomous intrusion into a government site. On state actors, it warns that as the global security environment deteriorates, state-sponsored actors are increasingly seeking to pre-position within networks for future operations. Defence Minister Richard Marles said AI is enabling cybercriminals and state-sponsored actors to launch 'faster, more sophisticated and scalable attacks'.

What an 80% rise in notifications means

By the numbers: more than 4,400 notifications of potentially malicious activity (up almost 80%), more than 1,500 incidents handled by ASD (300 more than last year and a 36% rise over five years), and more than 82,000 cybercrime reports, about one every six minutes. The protective DNS service processed more than 220 billion queries and blocked access to more than 564 million malicious domains. Self-reported losses averaged A$33,000 for individuals and A$93,500 for businesses, the latter up more than 16%. The report says the likelihood of an Australian organisation experiencing a cyber incident rose by more than 20% year on year.

ASD also addresses AI on the defensive side: its acting deputy director-general for intelligence said the agency is 'using AI to generate software capabilities much more quickly'. The report states that AI has more potential to boost sovereign capability than any technology since the Second World War, placing threat and opportunity in the same document.

Early-warning protocols with AI labs extended across the Five Eyes

The institutional novelty is that ASD has established 'early warning' protocols with AI developers including OpenAI, and Bradshaw stated that 'these protocols have been shared with all of the labs, and all of the Five Eyes'. Because frontier-model capability accelerates both discovery and exploitation of vulnerabilities, a channel that routes pre- and post-release information to government defenders is becoming standard allied practice. Japan set out a similar direction in May under Project YATA-Shield, so early-warning arrangements between AI firms and government agencies are now a comparable policy question among like-minded states including Japan and Australia.