Cyber Report 2026: Australian Edition

In 2026, I expect the Australian cybersecurity landscape to look less like a loose collection of tools and more like a contested systems market where a handful of platforms quietly run the show.

After 20 years in this industry, I can see the center of gravity shifting from individual point products to integrated decision engines that sit across identity, data and operations. The Australian cyber strategy out to 2030 is already pushing the industry toward coordinated outcomes rather than box ticking, and that pressure will only intensify as boards expect resilience, not just compliance.

On tooling, the consolidation trend is now impossible to ignore. The open extended detection and response story is moving from marketing language to practical necessity as security teams drown in parallel consoles, duplicate alerts and conflicting analytics.

The most successful platforms will be those that treat telemetry as a common data fabric, not as a proprietary moat. The market for artificial intelligence assisted security is on track to roughly quadruple globally by the end of the decade, and vendors that can prove real reduction in mean time to detect and respond rather than just nicer dashboards will win the budget arguments.

A Maturing Market

Accenture’s acquisition of CyberCX is the clearest signal yet that the Australian market has matured into a strategic cyber hub rather than a regional outpost.

A deal of that size, with more than one thousand four hundred specialists and a deep government and critical infrastructure footprint, will ripple for years.

In the short term, I expect an intense war for talent and for certain mid-market clients to feel squeezed as integration work consumes attention at the top end.

In the medium term, I expect more local firms to pick a lane, either doubling down on niche offensive services and advisory, or attaching themselves to global cloud and consulting ecosystems as specialist partners. For customers, this will accelerate the shift toward managed detection, response (MDR) and incident readiness, wrapped inside broader transformation programs.

The Emergence of LevelBlue

Equally transformative is LevelBlue’s acquisition of Trustwave. This deal will reshape the managed detection and response landscape across Asia Pacific and beyond. 

This move consolidates one of the oldest global MSSPs under a security-first entity purpose-built for unified threat detection, AI-driven analytics and sovereign operations.

For the Australian market, this will bring a renewed focus on cloud-native delivery, local data residency and tighter integration with hyperscaler ecosystems, especially Microsoft and AWS.

Trustwave’s deep bench in threat hunting, digital forensics and incident response combined with LevelBlue’s network and telemetry scale will create a formidable proposition for enterprises seeking transparent, measurable outcomes rather than black-box service models.

I expect to see LevelBlue push harder into the sovereign SOC narrative, using its Australian heritage and global reach to differentiate against larger consultancies now wrestling with integration challenges.

Artificial Intelligence’s Offensive and Defensive Roles

Artificial intelligence will define the 2026 conversation in two ways.

On the defensive side, we are already seeing agent-style co-workers inside security operations platforms that can assemble context, draft response actions and even simulate likely attacker next moves. The fastest improvements will appear in extended detection and response suites, security operations automation, email and collaboration security, and in identity threat detection where sequence analysis matters more than signature matching.

On the offensive side, threat actors are using models to generate convincing lures in any language, to mutate payloads for each target and to mine stolen datasets at a scale that manual tradecraft could never match. The net result is that speed and context become the only sustainable advantages and organizations that do not embed artificial intelligence into their security workflows will find themselves permanently a step behind.

Identity and Access Management

Identity will be the next major focus point in cyber defence because it is the one control surface that sits across every cloud, every device and every application.

We will see identity threat detection and response move from nice to have to core control alongside logging, and boards will start asking very direct questions about joiner, mover and leaver risk as well as third-party identity posture.

The breaches that took place in Australia and abroad over the last few years have shown that once an attacker can convincingly impersonate a trusted user or service account, traditional network and endpoint controls become background noise.

The rise of machine identities, non-person accounts in operational technology, and the explosive growth of software as a service have stretched legacy directory and access models well past design intent.

Modern identity security means continuous verification of who or what is acting, what they are doing and whether that behaviour matches an expected pattern.

Security Partnerships Will Be Key

In this environment, certified managed security providers that genuinely partner with customers will become more precious than an insider’s tip on who will take the AFL Premiership Cup.

The Australian managed security and managed service provider market is already valued in the billions and growing, and yet there is a widening gap between providers who simply resell technology and those who live inside their clients' operating rhythms.

Customers, particularly in critical infrastructure and regulated sectors, will increasingly look for providers who can prove independent audits, sovereign delivery capability, and alignment to national strategies, rather than just vendor badges. The firms that thrive will be those that accept shared accountability for outcomes, sit side by side with internal teams during incidents and are comfortable being measured on risk reduction and business continuity rather than raw ticket volumes.

The 2026 Threat Landscape

Threat actor groups and nation states will not disappear in 2026, but their behaviour will become more predictable in structure, even as individual campaigns remain inventive.

Ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS), initial access brokerage and data extortion ecosystems are already well established, and I expect these supply chains to harden into repeatable business models, particularly as law enforcement agencies shine more light into parts of the dark web.

The so-called dark web is a little less dark every year as takedowns, leaks and commercial threat intelligence platforms expose infrastructure and personas. This does not remove the threat, but it does compress the attack chain into repeatable patterns that good detection engineering and intelligence sharing can disrupt.

For nation-state aligned operations, I expect more activity sitting just below the traditional threshold of armed conflict, aimed at data collection, influence and critical infrastructure pressure rather than loud destruction.

3 Security Operations Areas to Focus on in 2026

From a security operations perspective, if I were setting training plans and budgets for 2026, I would prioritize three things:

1. Identity-centric defence, including deep familiarity with modern identity platforms, conditional access, privileged access management and identity threat detection.

2. Focus on artificial intelligence assisted operations, not just learning how to press the Copilot button, but understanding how models are trained, where their blind spots are and how to validate their outputs in the pressure of an incident.

3. Develop advanced investigation and response skills across cloud, endpoint, email and operational technology, including forensics, threat hunting and purple teaming that joins offensive thinking with defensive engineering. On top of this, I would invest in soft skills, because the ability for an analyst to explain risk clearly to a plant manager or a hospital executive during a crisis is often the difference between a contained event and a public disaster.

Budget-wise, I would assume that a larger share of spend moves from pure licensing to outcomes-based services and enablement.

That means setting aside a meaningful portion of the security budget for managed services that provide 24/7 coverage, but also ring-fencing funds for continuous training, certifications and joint exercises with key partners.

The organizations that will look back on 2026 with confidence will not be the ones that simply bought the most tools, they will be the ones that invested deliberately in platforms, people and partnerships that can adapt together as the threat landscape shifts. In other words, the technology stack will matter, but the operating model around it will matter more.