Sydney AI security startup Dam Secure has raised $6.1 million (US$4m) in a Seed round led by Washington, DC-based cybersecurity and AI investor, Paladin Capital Group. Dam Secure, founded by Patrick Collins and Simon Harloff, is developing an AI-native platform for organisations to manage the security risks created by the rapid adoption of AI coding… Read more »
Scams are more nuanced now. Deepfakes are more convincing. And at a time when one-click checkouts and real-time payments are the norm, security has soared far beyond being a mere ‘tech team problem’. In Mastercard’s January 2025 global survey of more than 5000 small business owners, 79 per cent said effective cybersecurity is critical to… Read more »
A British cybersecurity expert has landed a coveted tech visa for exceptional talent after he hacked an Australian government department and exposed a “critical vulnerability”. Jacob Riggs, a British national with more than a decade of experience in the cyber sector, was granted an 858 National Innovation visa in December, less than a year after… Read more »
Sydney cybersecurity SaaS platform MyCISO was named Startup of the Year at the 2025 Australian Information Security Association Awards. MyCISO tackles one of cybersecurity’s biggest frustrations: the reliance on manual spreadsheets and fragmented tools to manage increasingly complex security programs. The platform’s Security Operating System (SecurityOS) integrates assessments, risk, compliance, maturity, effectiveness, supplier security, culture,… Read more »
Data-scraping bot blocker Kasada has raised US$20 million (A$30m) in a round that values the business at $300 million. The round was backed by Swedish private equity giant EQT, with support from existing investors, including Malcolm Turnbull’s Turnbull & Partners, Westpac’s VC fund Reinventure, CSIRO-backed Main Sequence and OIF Ventures, and in the US, New… Read more »
Ahead of the TechStars Sydney ‘Demo the Future’ evening on December 8, Startup Daily is profiling the 12 startups and their founders in the 2025 cohort. Our next profile is Juxtabyte – a startup helping companies realise the value in their critical data and how to reuse this smartly. Juxtabyte Founder: Hugh Le One-liner: Juxtabyte… Read more »
Australia’s top national security bureaucrat used an AI chatbot to ghostwrite speeches and messages to his colleagues, internal documents show. As Finance Minister Katy Gallagher announces a significant government-wide AI plan to promote its use in the public service, Crikey has used freedom of information (FOI) laws to reveal how a government employee is already using the nascent… Read more »
Last week, OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT Atlas, a web browser that promises to revolutionise how we interact with the internet. The company’s CEO, Sam Altman, described it as a “once-a-decade opportunity” to rethink how we browse the web. The promise is compelling: imagine an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant that follows you across every website, remembers your… Read more »
RecordPoint, an Australian AI and data governance scaleup trusted by regulated enterprises globally, has launched RexCommand, a free tool designed to help businesses tackle one of the fastest-growing risks in tech: shadow AI. With AI adoption soaring, new data from Anagram shows 78% of employees are already using AI tools at work—often without approval. RecordPoint CEO and… Read more »
The federal government’s claim that several hundred Freedom of Information (FOI) applicants’ requests to the eSafety Commissioner last year were “AI bot-generated” is false, according to eSafety’s publicly available documents. “We’re frankly being inundated by anonymous requests … many of them we’re sure are AI bot-generated requests,” Minister for Health and Ageing Mark Butler said… Read more »
When you ask ChatGPT or other AI assistants to help create misinformation, they typically refuse, with responses like “I cannot assist with creating false information.” But our tests show these safety measures are surprisingly shallow – often just a few words deep – making them alarmingly easy to circumvent. We have been investigating how AI… Read more »
Cybersecurity workers in Australia are losing more hours of productivity to stress and burnout than they were just a year ago, with artificial intelligence both helping and hindering the situation according to a survey commissioned by cybersecurity firm Sophos. Industry professionals have lost 4.8 hours per week to stress and burnout in 2025 — a… Read more »
The government’s trial has found age-assurance for its under-16 social media ban can be done effectively and protect privacy but there is not a one-size-fits-all model. The report, from an independent company and released in full, also warns continued vigilance is needed on privacy and other issues. It found some providers, in the absence of… Read more »
An Australian compliance training company has been accused of turning the laptops of its workers into listening devices to surveil them while they worked from home. Online compliance training provider Safetrac deployed employee monitoring software earlier this year that recorded the audio and screens of some of its workers, which picked up online team meetings… Read more »
Melbourne scaleup CyberCX is potentially a unicorn following plans by professional services giant Accenture to acquire the six-year-old cybersecurity platform in a $1 billion-plus deal. CyberCX was founded in 2019 by former Optus Business boss John Paitaridis and Alastair MacGibbon, the former Australian government cyber security tsar. It was created from the merger of a dozen smaller… Read more »
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