25 September 2026

Emma Rebellato: Well, let's get more now on the hack on the government's medical data that was revealed yesterday. Lieutenant General Michelle McGuinness is Australia's National Cyber Security Coordinator and joins us now from Parliament House. Good morning.

Lieutenant General Michelle McGuinness: Good morning, Emma.

Emma Rebellato: Were you preparing for something like this to happen? Was this expected?

Lieutenant General Michelle McGuinness: Emma, we've been engaging and understanding the evolving technology for quite some time now and particularly since Mythos and since the Mythos capability was announced earlier this year. But we've certainly been working very hard, releasing great advice across industry and across government, preparing to harden our systems even further.

Emma Rebellato: Well, what does it say about Australia's IT systems that this was able to happen?

Lieutenant General Michelle McGuinness: Emma, this is incredibly capable technology. You know, to be able to find vulnerabilities in systems has long been a human endeavour and today these agents can actually do that quite fast. It used to take humans quite a lot of effort and quite a lot of time to do that. Today it's happening very fast, and we're working very closely across the cyber ecosystem here in Australia with industry, with critical infrastructure, across governments and with our international partners, including the Frontier Labs, to really understand the technologies and, of course, harden our systems.

Emma Rebellato: Are you worried that Australia - the Australian Government - that the websites weren't able to detect or notify within the system that this had happened, that this went undetected for so long?

Lieutenant General Michelle McGuinness: Look, the vulnerabilities, when they're found are often reported through that way. But we need better approaches. We are identifying better ways to notify of these systems. This was a web-faced data set, this was a web-facing data set, and that information, importantly, did not contain any personal or identifiable information. But it's critically important that we identify all of our surface, all of our websites and ensure that they are all secure. We certainly have worked very hard under our strategy to focus on our critical government systems, our critical infrastructure systems and continue to harden and strengthen them so that they are both secure and resilient.

Emma Rebellato: Given the work that's going on behind the scenes, as you've just mentioned, but the fact that this technology is moving so quickly, is it inevitable that this sort of thing could happen again?

Lieutenant General Michelle McGuinness: Look, security and resilience is a journey and not a destination. So, we're going to have to continue to engage, particularly with the technology providers, to understand - rapidly understand and to evolve. I think the very quick adoption of a task force to understand this exact incident is exactly right. And we've had, already, experts across government convene yesterday after the Prime Minister announced the task force and they'll be looking very closely. We'll be looking very closely at what we need to do to adjust and adapt. We are working very hard to adapt to the speed of the technology, which is very fast.

Emma Rebellato. So, what sort of role will you have in this task force? You will be part of it, I'm assuming?

Lieutenant General Michelle McGuinness: Yes, I will. As the coordinator, my role is - with my team, is to coordinate nationally significant incidents. So, understanding how we respond to an incident that is from an agent, so it's unauthorised agent behaviour, understanding how do we detect, respond as efficiently and effectively as we can to ensure that we minimise harm and mitigate the consequences, and also that we are resilient to move through it and not be impacted by these incidents.

Emma Rebellato: What happens now, particularly with this task force, what happens in terms of the timeline? Because we know the government's looking at various legislation for next year, but what are we looking at now in the next few months?

Lieutenant General Michelle McGuinness: Emma, it's a very rapid task force, so it's already convened after being announced yesterday, and we'll work very quickly through understanding gaps, opportunities and challenges that we'll need to address and then to bring those forward to government. It has experts from across government involved, and I expect it will happen pretty quickly.

Emma Rebellato: We know government has a lot of resources compared to a lot of industry and individual companies. How should they be managing this and looking at potential risks going forward?

Lieutenant General Michelle McGuinness: Look, the government does provide fantastic advice. I recommend that everyone goes to cyber.gov.au, where the Australian Signals Directorate have released advice on how to protect, defend and identify this kind of behaviour. I think also one of the very powerful things about the Australian cyber ecosystem is that we have fantastic partnerships. I think they're unprecedented the way that we partner across government, across industry and with tech. And quite often today, industry are on the front edge of tech, and we're working incredibly closely to both understand the threat, provide advice and to mitigate any of those threats that are evolving.

Emma Rebellato: Lieutenant General Michelle McGuinness, thanks for your time.

Lieutenant General Michelle McGuinness: Thanks, Emma.