When Australia’s Parliament House tells MPs and staff to switch off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth during a high-level foreign visit, that’s more than operational caution, it’s a public lesson in cyber hygiene. According to CyberDaily, the Department of Parliamentary Services warned occupants to disable wireless connectivity ahead of the Chinese National People’s Congress chairman’s visit, a move the shadow cyber security minister called “a stark reminder of the reality of the cyber threats we’re facing.” (Cyber Daily)
For business, and partners and resellers, the signal is clear: if our national leaders are prepared to degrade convenience to protect critical assets, the rest of us need to take cyber risk just as seriously.
The leadership moment: assume breach, plan accordingly
Australia has a proud “She’ll be right” streak. It’s optimistic, resilient, and dangerously out of date in the modern world of business, miscalibrated in the modern threat environment. State-sponsored actors target people, process and infrastructure, and they do it patiently. So, if Parliament can’t safely enable Wi-Fi on a sensitive day of business, why would a commercial business assume immunity from targeted attacks?
The pragmatic posture is to ‘assume breach’:
- Adopt a zero-trust stance, and treat identity, email and endpoint as continuous attack surfaces.
- Reduce ambient risk during high-exposure events (travel, VIP visits, quarter-end, M&A).
- Make temporary inconvenience a feature, not a failure. That’s what resilience looks like.
What this means for your customers (and your Q1 conversations)
Use this moment to move clients from “compliance” to operational resilience. Here are some points for discussion, that you can run as a light engagement with clients or as part of a managed service.
1) People and policy
- Travel & visitor playbook. Define Wi-Fi/Bluetooth rules, tethering bans, and “clean device” options for sensitive meetings.
- Role-based controls. Temporary step-ups for executives, finance and privileged admins during high-risk periods.
- Phishing realism. Push short, high-fidelity simulations tied to current lures (billing, delivery, MFA resets). Track time-to-report, not just click rate.
2) Email as the first gate
- Assume credential theft attempts daily. Most intrusions start in the inbox with believable pretexts.
- Independent detection layer. Pair native email defenses in Microsoft 365 and Google with specialist AI-powered threat detection that focuses on intent, language and behavioural cues. Not just links and files. To stop credential and BEC campaigns before users engage.
- Operational resilience. Measure and brief on time at risk, incidents prevented and credential attacks blocked.
3) Identity and access
- MFA hardening. Disable weak factors; enforce phishing-resistant methods where feasible.
- Conditional access sanity check. Geo and impossible-travel rules, session lifetime policies, and device posture validation.
- Break-glass accounts. Test them, vault them, monitor them.
4) Operations
- High-risk calendar. Mark periods that spike exposure (payroll, EOFY, supplier cutovers, major events). Raise monitoring and tighten exceptions for those windows.
- Vendor access review. Re-attest external identities and revoke stale Entra/IDP guest access.
- Tabletop in 60 minutes. Run a short, email-led BEC scenario with finance and legal so money-movement safeguards are muscle memory.
Use the example from parliament as an opportunity to start client conversations.
- “When Parliament turns off Wi-Fi, that’s leadership by example…
- Let us help you adopt the same ‘assume breach’ posture, with short policies your team can follow,…
- controls that reduce risk fast, and reporting your board understands.”
Offer a short “resilience sprint” or workshop to kick off in readiness for 2026:
- Assess email controls and recent near-misses,
- Tighten identity and travel policies,
- Agree three actions to complete in 30 days (with owners and dates).
Editor’s note: We respect that guidance to disable connectivity inside Parliament is context-specific, and not every business event warrants the same controls. The point is proportionality: businesses must be willing to trade convenience for resilience when the stakes are high, and especially heading into the holidays, they must expect the unexpected.
Keeping Businesses Safe and Secure
Prevention is always better than a cure, and one of the best defences is to encourage businesses to proactively boost their company’s cyber resilience levels to avoid threats landing in inboxes in the first place. The fact that a staggering 94% of malware attacks are delivered by email, makes email an extremely important vector for businesses to fortify.
No one vendor can stop all email threats, so it’s crucial to remind customers that if they are using Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, they should also have a third-party email security specialist in place to mitigate their risk. For example, using a specialist AI-powered email threat detection solution like MailGuard.
For a few dollars per staff member per month, businesses are protected by MailGuard's specialist, AI-powered zero-day email security. Special Ops for when speed matters! Our real-time zero-day, email threat detection amplifies your client’s intelligence, knowledge, security and defence.
MailGuard provides a range of solutions to keep businesses safe, from email filtering to email continuity and archiving solutions. Speak to your clients today to ensure they’re prepared and get in touch with our team to discuss fortifying your client’s cyber resilience.
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