Setting the tone for the priorities and thorniest challenges facing cyber governance, strategy and risk professionals.

Setting the tone for the priorities and thorniest challenges facing cyber detection and response professionals.

Westpac operates in one of Australia’s most highly targeted and regulated environments, making cyber security a core business function rather than a support capability. This session explores how Westpac is embedding security across operations, using real time intelligence, strong governance and continuous uplift to stay ahead of evolving threats.

• Embedding cyber security across the organisation to support resilience and long term risk management
• Strengthening detection, response and visibility in an increasingly complex threat landscape
• Balancing security, regulation and customer experience while enabling business outcomes

Cyber risk in NSW is now deeply interconnected across agencies, sectors and jurisdictions. This panel examines how NSW is strengthening cross-government coordination to manage incidents that cascade beyond organisational boundaries.

• Managing systemic risk across government ecosystems
• Coordinating leadership during multi-agency incidents
• Strengthening whole-of-state crisis alignment

For many agencies, it is not the ideas or intent that hold projects back, it is the process.

Forward-thinking agencies are moving from reactive administration to proactive strategy, putting systems in place that make good governance second nature.

• How do you maximise AI opportunities in a world of compliance and regulation. 
• How do you build governance mechanisms into the AI development process from the start.
• How do you build trust with stakeholders about AI development alongside regulatory process.

AI is transforming how government agencies deliver services and support decision-making, but it also introduces new security and data protection risks. 

From unsanctioned AI tools to risky prompts and sensitive data sharing, traditional controls may not provide the visibility needed to detect emerging threats. 

This session explores how agencies can strengthen detection and response capabilities for AI-related risks, helping protect citizen data, reduce exposure, and enable responsible AI adoption with greater confidence.

Cyber resilience now demands executive ownership, not just technical expertise. This session explores how NSW is strengthening leadership capability to govern cyber risk alongside service delivery, reform and innovation.

• Elevating cyber to executive decision-making
• Aligning cyber with digital, risk and reform agendas
• Building leadership confidence under scrutiny

Dheeraj Dhiman

Head of Cyber Security Optimisation, icare

Nivedita Newar

Deputy Chief Information Security Officer, University of NSW

Andrew McAllister

Vice President of APAC Sales, CoreView

Maryam Shoraka

Head of OT Cybersecurity Operations, ISACA

Recent incidents across NSW result in valuable lessons for other agencies. This session examines how real-world breaches are reshaping policy, investment and operational priorities across the state.

• What NSW incidents reveal about systemic vulnerabilities
• How agencies are strengthening preparedness post-breach
• Translating lessons learned into structural reform

Matthew Craft

Commander, Cybercrime Squad, NSW Police

Melissa Clemens

Chief Security Officer, Service NSW

Jacki Muir

Director ID Support, Cyber Security NSW

Harry Chichadjian

Security Sales Director, Elastic

AI is rapidly reshaping the threat landscape, yet many government security strategies have not evolved to keep pace. This session explores why traditional approaches are falling short for NSW agencies, and what a modern, fit-for-purpose strategy looks like.

• Understand why your current strategy may already be outdated and the key assumptions AI has fundamentally changed
• Learn four critical strategic shifts to move from reactive defence to continuous, resilience-led security
• Discover how to position security as an enabler for safe AI adoption and improved mission outcomes

Attendees will leave with a clear, practical framework to modernise their security posture and confidently respond to emerging AI-driven risks.

Cyber risk only becomes meaningful when people understand how it affects them, their colleagues and the communities they serve. This session explores practical, evidence-based approaches to making cyber threats relatable for non-technical staff and embedding awareness into everyday behaviours across large NSW Government workforces.

• Using real-world incidents and human-centred storytelling to translate abstract cyber threats into practical lessons.
• Designing awareness programs that drive measurable behaviour change rather than compliance completion rates.
• Sustaining engagement through ongoing reinforcement, leadership modelling and integrating cyber into daily workflows.

This information session outlines how Horizon 2 of the Australian Cyber Security Strategy is scaling national cyber resilience, with a focus on operational performance, a whole-of-economy approach, and targeted, high-impact action.

• Outlines how Horizon 2 is shifting from foundational uplift to real-time operational resilience across government, industry and citizens.
• Emphasises a whole-of-economy approach, strengthening collaboration across critical infrastructure, businesses and supply chains to deliver coordinated national response.
• Highlights targeted, high-impact actions to build the human firewall, protect critical systems, and embed secure-by-design technology to reduce cyber risk at scale.

The public sector faces both opportunity and risk with generative AI. This session explores how to set guardrails, audit AI models, and align with Australia’s emerging critical infrastructure legislation.

The emergence of Mythos-class AI has permanently changed what defensible security means for government agencies. Attackers can now discover and exploit vulnerabilities at machine speed — making continuous, real-time visibility a baseline requirement, not best practice. This roundtable explores:

• how agencies can move from static compliance reports to continuously updated, executive-ready metrics 
• What good looks like: patch status, remediation velocity, and control effectiveness 
• How risk-based prioritisation helps leaders direct effort to where it matters most 
• how agencies can reduce exposure and deliver stronger audit outcomes

Meeting Compliance and Agility Goals: Government is under pressure to innovate quickly while maintaining strict compliance. This session demonstrates how cloud security can enable speed and resilience without creating policy or compliance gaps.

How organisations enable AI experimentation without compromising sensitive data.

With adversaries weaponising AI, agencies must evolve their defences. This session examines how AI/ML can detect, predict, and counter novel threats faster than human-only teams.

As industries become more reliant on interconnected OT systems, attackers are leveraging AI to automate and scale attacks.

This session examines key OT challenges and how organisations can protect critical infrastructure while maintaining operational continuity.

As NSW Government agencies progress the NSW Cyber Security Strategy 2026–2028, identity is becoming a critical component of cyber defence. With attacks increasingly targeting identities, agencies need greater visibility and control across workforce, privileged, third-party, and non-human identities.

This roundtable brings together government cyber leaders to discuss how identity intelligence can strengthen SOC operations, improve threat detection, reduce excessive access, and support faster incident response.

Discussion topics include:

• Identity visibility across government environments
• Managing privileged, third-party, and non-human identities
• Reducing identity-related risk through least privilege
• Bringing identity context into SOC workflows
• Supporting Zero Trust and cyber resilience initiatives
• Preparing for AI-driven identities and emerging threats

This session will provide an opportunity for peer discussion and practical insights on using identity security to strengthen cyber resilience across government.

While the Essential 8 remains the gold standard for cyber hygiene, its implementation faces a new, non-human challenge. In 2026, the rise of "Agentic AI" and the explosion of machine identities have created a landscape where the most privileged "users" in your agency are no longer people—they are service accounts, APIs, and autonomous bots. This roundtable will dive into the practical friction of reaching Maturity Levels 2 and 3 when your administrative surface is increasingly automated.

• The intelligence gap: The Strategy calls for coordinated, intelligence response and a shift to tri-annual threat assessments. How many agencies are actually consuming and acting on threat intelligence in a way that changes what they do day-to-day?
• The sharing problem: Cross-agency intelligence sharing is named in the Strategy, but what's blocking it? Trust, classification, resourcing, tooling or all the above?
• The starting point question: If you had to take one concrete step toward coordinated intelligence response in the next 90 days, what would it be and what would get in the way?