93% of Australian Organisations Were Hit by Cyber Incidents: Cisco’s Defence Index

Here is a number that should make every Australian executive pay attention: 93 percent. That is the share of Australian organisations that suffered a material cyber incident in the past year, according to Cisco's new Defence Index research. Not a probe, not a phishing email caught by the filter. A real incident, serious enough to make the count. And the uncomfortable detail is this: companies have been spending more on security than ever, yet almost half of them say things either stayed the same or got worse.

Australia sits in the "reactive tier"

Cisco's Defence Index gave Australia a score of 62 out of 100, placing the country in what the company calls the reactive tier. The global average was 64, so Australia is running slightly behind the rest of the world. Only 5% of Australian organisations qualified as what Cisco calls "Relentless Defenders", compared with 8% globally. That label goes to organisations with broad, consistent security coverage, faster response times and fewer internal bottlenecks.

More money is not buying fewer incidents

Most Australian enterprises have been opening their wallets. Cisco found that 89% raised their cyber security budgets over the past two years. Yet 45% said incident levels either stayed the same or increased: 33% reported no change and 12% reported a rise. The money, on its own, is not moving the needle. Cisco's data points to an interesting split, though. Among organisations that increased their spending, the top performers were nearly twice as likely to report a fall in incidents, 71% versus 39%. The difference was not how much they spent. It was how well the organisation was run.

The biggest obstacle is not the technology

Ask security practitioners what is really holding them back and most do not point at the tooling. Cisco found that 63% see internal organisational friction as a bigger obstacle than technology. The symptoms are familiar to anyone who has worked inside a large company. Ownership issues, approval delays and data silos across IT, procurement and executive leadership slow down response times.

Less than half of respondents in Australia, 46%, said their security, networking and IT teams operated as one team with shared visibility and tools. Around 40% said the metrics they track are too technical to persuade executives, while 42% said they struggle to turn business metrics into information that can influence decision-making.

AI is now on both sides of the fight

Artificial intelligence has become the defining force in this story, on both sides. Cisco reports that more than 37% of the material incidents reported by Australian organisations involved an AI-enhanced attack. Attackers are using AI to move faster, craft better phishing lures and find vulnerabilities at a scale humans cannot match.

Defenders know AI can help. Among Australian practitioners, 88% said they had seen detection and response gains of at least 25% from AI, and 35% said it was significantly reducing their operational burden. But adoption is lagging behind belief: only 39% of organisations said they had extensively deployed AI-powered security tools.

What the best organisations do differently

The top-scoring organisations in Cisco's research stood out less for their spending levels than for their coordination and governance. Among that group, 83% said they operate as a single coordinated security team with shared visibility and tools across security, network and infrastructure, compared with 37% of everyone else.

They also reported stronger controls over AI and non-human identities. Cisco found that 86% of these organisations apply consistent controls there, compared with 37% of the rest, while 77% were very confident they could detect and respond to a compromised AI agent, against 51% elsewhere.

The research also suggests these organisations are seeing clearer gains from AI in day-to-day operations. One quarter said AI had improved their threat detection speed by more than 100%, compared with 7% of other respondents.

Carl Solder, Cisco's chief technology officer for Australia and New Zealand, summed up the shift: "AI adoption in the network was inevitable because human reaction time couldn't keep pace with packet-level threats years ago. The network became machine-speed by necessity. Security operations are now hitting that exact same inflection point. The organisations pulling ahead aren't treating AI as a separate chatbot in the SOC; they are treating the network fabric as the sensor and enforcement engine for the entire security stack."

What this means for Australian organisations

The report's message is uncomfortable but constructive. Australian organisations do not have a budget problem. They have a coordination problem and a deployment problem. The tools exist, the money is being spent, and AI is demonstrably helping where it is used.

What is missing is the unglamorous stuff: shared visibility between teams, clear decision rights, metrics executives can act on, and consistent controls for the growing population of AI agents inside corporate networks. The companies that get those foundations right are seeing their incident numbers fall.

For an Australian firm reading this, the most useful question is not "do we need a bigger security budget". It is "how long does it take us to go from a signal to a decision". In 2026, that is the number that matters.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is Australia rated behind the global average on cyber defence?

Cisco's Defence Index gave Australia 62 out of 100, just below the global average of 64. Only 5% of Australian organisations reached "Relentless Defender" status, versus 8% worldwide. The gap is driven less by technology or spending and more by internal friction: 63% of practitioners called it a bigger obstacle than technology.

What is an AI-enhanced attack?

An AI-enhanced attack uses artificial intelligence to make cyber attacks faster, more convincing or harder to detect. That can mean AI-written phishing emails that mimic a colleague's writing style, automated scanning for software vulnerabilities, or malware that adapts its behaviour. Cisco found more than 37% of material incidents in Australia involved such attacks, which is why defenders are under pressure to adopt AI-powered security tools of their own.

How much are Australian companies spending on cyber security?

Most are spending more than ever: 89% of Australian enterprises raised their cyber security budgets over the past two years, according to Cisco's research. But spending alone has not produced better results, with 45% saying incident levels stayed the same or increased. The organisations that saw incidents fall were the ones combining spending with strong internal coordination and governance.