AUSTRALIA'S AGING TECH VULNERABLE TO AI ATTACKS

Abigail Bradshaw, chief of one of Australia's leading intelligence agencies, flagged the vulnerability gap between aging systems and modern security threats. The country's critical infrastructure relies on technology that cannot meet contemporary availability demands, she said. Updating these systems would require "enormous" amounts of government funding, according to Bradshaw. The warning highlights a growing gap between infrastructure age and the sophistication of emerging threats. Meanwhile, Anthropic's chief cautioned that AI bots could proliferate across the internet within a year, potentially accelerating attack sophistication. The dual pressures—aging defenses and advancing AI capabilities—underscore urgent infrastructure modernization needs. Australia's government is currently negotiating AI regulatory frameworks, but the intelligence chief's comments suggest infrastructure investment must accompany those policy decisions to protect national systems from coordinated AI attacks.