Global Information Summit Australia 2026

Description

Global Information Summit Australia 2026: understanding the age of information power

The international system is changing in a way that many people can feel, but not always easily describe. Around the world, governments, companies and communities are experiencing a new form of pressure: one that combines cyber intrusion, manipulation of information, AI-enabled deception, economic coercion and attacks on trust. This is not only a defence issue. It is a whole-of-society issue.

In simple terms, information power is the ability to shape what people know, believe, decide and do. Used lawfully and responsibly, it helps governments, institutions and communities communicate, coordinate and build resilience.

Used maliciously, it can be turned into a weapon: to confuse, divide, intimidate, deceive, steal advantage or undermine public confidence. That is why information warfare is no longer confined to military doctrine. It now affects democratic debate, market confidence, infrastructure resilience, business continuity and community cohesion.

Artificial intelligence is intensifying this shift. Official cyber assessments in the United Kingdom conclude that AI is lowering barriers for novice cyber criminals, hackers-for-hire and hacktivists, particularly in reconnaissance, information gathering, social engineering and the exploitation of stolen data.

The same assessments also warn that technical surprise is likely as AI capabilities continue to advance. This does not mean that AI has replaced skilled human operators. It means that it is making malicious activity faster, cheaper, more personalised and easier to scale.

For the Five Eyes countries and Quad partners, the implications are strategic. Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and other close partners increasingly see cyber security, critical technologies, telecommunications, infrastructure resilience and information manipulation as interlinked, not separate. The Australia–US memorandum on countering foreign state information manipulation reflects a recognition that influence operations are now a matter of statecraft and national resilience, not merely media management.

Likewise, the Quad’s continuing work on cyber resilience, critical technologies, secure connectivity and undersea cable resilience shows that the Indo-Pacific is being viewed through a practical security lens in which information systems and infrastructure are inseparable from geopolitical stability.

This matters especially to Australia and regional partners because the Indo-Pacific is both strategically contested and highly connected. It depends on trusted telecommunications, secure digital infrastructure, open sea lanes, undersea cables, financial confidence, and stable public institutions.

Disruption in one area can quickly cascade into others. A cyber intrusion into a telecommunications provider is not merely an IT incident if it degrades confidence, enables espionage, affects emergency coordination or exposes sensitive metadata. Public statements from Australian and US agencies about hostile activity compromising major global telecommunications providers illustrate how serious this threat has become.

The challenge is also broader than hostile states alone. Official reporting from Australia and the UK emphasises that the threat environment includes capable state actors, organised cybercrime groups and hybrid actors who move between espionage, fraud, disruption and influence.

Australia’s cyber threat reporting notes that malicious state actors and cybercriminals continue to adapt their tradecraft against government, critical infrastructure, businesses and households. The UK’s NCSC has similarly described today’s threat environment as “diffuse and dangerous”, where hostile state activity compounds the challenges posed by organised crime.

That is why this issue now reaches deeply into sectors that once saw themselves as adjacent to national security. Critical infrastructure operators must manage the growing interdependence of physical systems and digital networks. Energy, water, transport, ports, health and logistics all rely on data flows, industrial control systems, identity, timing and secure communications.

The targeting of programmable logic controllers and operational technology by state-linked actors has reinforced the point that infrastructure disruption can be both a technical and a psychological event: it can interrupt services and simultaneously send a message of vulnerability.

The telecommunications sector sits at the centre of this challenge. Networks are not just commercial utilities; they are strategic enablers of national power, emergency response, defence coordination and economic continuity. ENISA’s telecommunications threat work highlights supply chain concerns, the increasing role of AI in network management, and the need to protect underlying algorithms and sensitive data.

For Australia, the Quad’s attention to cable resilience and secure connectivity underscores that communications infrastructure is now part of strategic deterrence and national resilience.

The banking, fintech and broader financial services sectors face a parallel challenge. Financial authorities in the United States have warned that AI can amplify cybersecurity, fraud and operational risks. FinCEN’s 2024 alert on deepfake-enabled fraud makes plain that generative AI is already being used to create falsified documents, videos and identities capable of bypassing customer due diligence and verification processes.

Treasury has also highlighted that AI introduces risks around third-party providers, data privacy, resilience and cyber security. In plain language, the financial system is becoming more efficient and more exposed at the same time.

There is also a deeper social dimension. The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Global Risks Report again ranked misinformation and disinformation among the most severe short-term global risks, warning of their effect on social cohesion and governance.

NATO’s work on cognitive warfare likewise argues that modern competition increasingly targets human perception, trust and decision-making, not just networks and machines. This is the part of the challenge that communities often feel before they can name it: the erosion of confidence in institutions, the blurring of truth and fabrication, and the use of digital tools to intensify division.

So is this a global cold war? A balanced answer is that it is not a replica of the twentieth century Cold War. Today’s environment is more networked, less binary and more commercially entangled. Yet there is a credible argument that much of the world is living through a form of persistent undeclared conflict: one conducted through cyber operations, information manipulation, strategic technology competition, economic pressure, espionage and attacks on trust.

The US Intelligence Community’s threat assessments continue to warn that China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, alongside non-state actors, present converging cyber and influence challenges, and that growing cooperation among some adversaries increases risk. That is not a formal declaration of cold war, but it is a clear description of sustained strategic contest.

For democratic states and trusted partners, the response cannot come from defence alone. It requires a coalition across government, industry, infrastructure operators, telecommunications providers, financial services, academia and civil society. It requires better doctrine, more resilient systems, stronger public communication, clearer standards for AI use, and a workforce that understands both the technology and the human domain.

That is the strategic rationale for GISA26. Its importance lies not only in discussing threat, but in helping partners build the ecosystem, fuse capabilities and develop the profession needed to respond to the age of AI-enabled information contest.