The Australian Signals Directorate released its seventh Annual Cyber Threat Report (ACTR) 2025-26 on 27 October, covering the 2025-26 financial year. ASD's ACSC received more than 82,000 cybercrime reports — averaging one every six minutes — responded to more than 1,500 cyber security incidents, a 20% increase on FY2024-25 and 36% above the level of five years ago, and notified entities more than 4,400 times about potentially malicious activity, almost an 80% increase, split across more than 2,200 individual notifications and collective notifications to more than 2,100 entities. AI is the report's organising theme: ASD states that AI has allowed malicious actors to find vulnerabilities faster and exploit them at unprecedented scale, speed and sophistication, and that in recent weeks new threats have emerged from the unintended actions of AI agents and model testing. State-sponsored actors are increasingly seeking to pre-position inside Australian networks for future intelligence collection or disruption, and compromised accounts and credentials were among the most frequently reported incident categories across government, industry and critical infrastructure. Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles wrote the foreword.

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