CYBER RESILIENCEShared Risks, Shared Advantage: Collaborating for Collective Cyber Resilience
The same connectivity that powers our prosperity, and which has driven innovation and growth, has also created shared vulnerabilities and structural fragilities. We are increasingly seeing how a single weak link, often in a third-party provider, can cascade across industries, economies and borders.
This is the edited text of a speech to the Public Sector Networks’ Government Cyber Security Showcase Federal on 12 November 2025.
It’s an honor to speak with you at a time when the foundations of our digital world are being stress-tested like never before.
The same connectivity that powers our prosperity, and which has driven innovation and growth, has also created shared vulnerabilities and structural fragilities.
We are increasingly seeing how a single weak link, often in a third-party provider, can cascade across industries, economies and borders.
We know adversaries are embedding persistence across a range of critical systems—seeking not just to steal data or intellectual property but to pre-position access that can be weaponized later in crisis.
It’s clear that cyber security is no longer just a technical function limited to chief information security officers. It’s more and more the pressure test of national resilience.
It’s precisely this context that demands of us a shift in mindset—from self-protection to systems stewardship; from compliance to resilience; and from government being central defender to instead being ecosystem enabler.
Why? Because the line between company safety, economic stability and national security is now almost indistinguishable.
Evolving Threat Landscape
Too often, we still treat every major cyber breach as a wake-up call. But after a decade of alarms perhaps we should already be awake.
What we’re experiencing are no longer isolated failures but are instead structural fragilities that are being surfaced.
As societies we’ve built technological ecosystems that are hyper-interdependent—a web of supply chains, cloud services and shared platforms that connect us, but also bind us.
At the same time, the threats confronting these ecosystems are becoming systemic, strategic and sustained—designed to undermine trust, disable infrastructure and erode confidence in institutions.
Nation-state actors are mapping interdependencies, testing responses and preparing to replicate disruptions at scale.
Criminal syndicates, now operating with state-level capability, are exploiting the same pathways. These malign actors are watching and learning. Studying how outages unfold, and preparing to replicate them at scale.
New technologies—like AI, automation and quantum computing—are amplifying speed and scale.
Each event experienced is a stress test, exposing where resilience ends and fragility begins. Recent incidents—from the Qantas data leak to the Collins Aerospace breach, and even the Amazon Web Services outage in October and the Azure outage only days later (two hyper-scalers in just a week)—offer reminders of this reality.
