Accelerating Protective Security Capability for Defence and Critical Infrastructure Industries

Protective security refers to the measures and practices designed to safeguard people, information, assets, and critical infrastructure against threats including espionage, sabotage, foreign interference, and malicious cyber activities.
Australia faces a decade of rapidly escalating protective security threats. Traditional security approaches, characterised by manual and fragmented methods, are becoming increasingly ineffective as new threats emerge, demanding a rapid and comprehensive capability uplift across Defence and critical infrastructure. Major challenges include:

-Collapse of Physical Distance: Cyber threats, drones, and disinformation campaigns can easily penetrate national borders, diminishing the protective effect of geographic isolation.
-Machine-Speed Attacks: AI-driven technologies enable threats that outpace human detection and response capabilities.
-Convergence of Vulnerabilities: Increased integration of digital, physical, and human systems multiplies vulnerabilities across Defence and critical infrastructure sectors.
-Geopolitical Tensions: Rising grey-zone cyber operations targeting critical infrastructure, influence campaigns against civil society, and weakened digital sovereignty due to heightened global interdependence.

By 2030, these threats will intensify, driven by advanced technologies including autonomous surveillance, edge computing vulnerabilities on Defence platforms, complex supply chain compromises, and sophisticated insider threats. Current security frameworks will struggle with resource constraints, slow threat detection, and ineffective responses.

To address these challenges, an uplift is required across multiple interconnected domains:

Frameworks: Adaptable risk models aligned to protective security domains (governance, physical, personnel, information, and cyber security) that support proactive detection, management, and response to complex threats. These must be supported by appropriate operating models, service delivery, assurance and continuous improvement elements.

Partnerships: Strengthened cross-sector collaborations, connecting Defence, industry, academia, and civil society to rapidly translate threat intelligence into protective actions.

Technologies: Advanced protective security technologies – including AI analytics, quantum-resistant encryption, drones, extensive sensor networks, real-time threat intelligence platforms, behavioural analytics, and open-source intelligence – to enhance real-time threat identification and response.

Skills: Continuous workforce training and capability building, aligned to evolving threats and regulatory compliance requirements (e.g., CMMC, SOCI), ensuring Defence and critical infrastructure personnel can effectively respond to emerging threats.

Legislation: More responsive and adaptable legislation that can keep pace with technological advances including pervasive surveillance, automation, and sophisticated misinformation threats like deepfakes.

This project will develop practical concept demonstrators with tangible prototyped use cases. The demonstrators will be designed to support a measurable uplift across each of these domains, with the ultimate aim of strengthening Australia's response to evolving protective security threats.

Findings and insights gathered through the development and real-world testing of the concept demonstrator will be used to develop a Protective Security Threat Protection Roadmap which provides practical guidance and interventions for Defence and critical infrastructure organisations. This will shorten the time and effort for organisations to reach the level of capability maturity required to mitigate increasingly sophisticated threats.