The Australian Securities and Investments Commission and the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority have published an information paper and preparedness checklist urging financial market entities to take decisive action against cyber and operational risks intensified by frontier artificial intelligence. Building on recent regulatory warnings, the materials draw on nine industry roundtables attended by more than 600 participants and emphasize that boards and executives need tested response plans, a clear understanding of vulnerabilities and pre-agreed crisis decisions as AI compresses incident response timeframes. Entities should strengthen core cyber controls, including management of critical assets, timely patching, identity and access controls, secure backups, recovery testing and third-party risk management. Boards should determine risk appetite, escalation authority, recovery priorities and communications before an incident. The regulators also highlighted concentration risks from shared service providers, the need for sectorwide intelligence sharing and supplier assurance, and growing interest in defensive AI for threat detection and incident response, while noting that such capabilities remain limited.

Original source