Government Cyber Security Showcase New South Wales

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.

Artificial intelligence is changing how attacks are launched and how government defends itself. This session explores how NSW is preparing for AI-enabled threats while safely adopting AI across government services.

• AI as both threat accelerator and defence capability
• Governing automation without slowing innovation
• Maintaining accountability in machine-driven environments

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

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

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

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.

NSW government services increasingly rely on third parties and cyber incidents don’t stop at contractual boundaries. This session exposes how agencies are reshaping assurance models to stay in control when critical risk lives outside government walls.

• Seeing third-party risk before it becomes a public incident
• Moving beyond contracts to continuous, real-world assurance
• Protecting services, trust and accountability across shared ecosystems

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.

As Government agencies accelerate digital transformation, this roundtable brings together public sector security leaders for a frank, peer-level conversation about what cloud security maturity genuinely looks like within government constraints — balancing VPSF, PSPF, and Essential Eight obligations against the realities of legacy infrastructure, stretched teams, and growing threat complexity.

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.

Safeguarding the Digital Future: Explore how zero trust frameworks can be practically implemented across departments, from legacy systems to modern cloud platforms. The session highlights lessons learned from government rollouts and vendor expertise in enabling secure, identity-first operations.

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.

The traditional network perimeter has dissolved. Government is now borderless - spanning contractors, partners, legacy platforms, SaaS, and emerging AI systems. With the majority of breaches originating from compromised or misused credentials, identity has become the primary control point for cyber resilience.

This roundtable will explore how agencies can reduce breach risk by improving identity visibility, enforcing least privilege, and operationalising zero trust in complex environments. Discussion will also address the challenge of balancing compliance obligations with seamless access, while managing cost pressures and operational efficiency.

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.