Defending Against AI-Enabled Cyber Attacks: Practical Checks for Australian SMEs

Artificial intelligence is making cyber attacks faster, more convincing and easier to scale. For a small business, that means an attacker may find exposed website software, weak accounts or outdated devices more quickly than before. The practical response is to make important systems harder to compromise and easier to restore.

Start with the public-facing systems

List the websites, domains, hosting accounts, plugins, forms and connected services that customers use. Turn off websites and features that are no longer needed. Confirm that every active site has a clear owner and a support arrangement.

Make updates routine

Enable automatic security updates where appropriate and apply critical patches quickly. Ask who checks that updates succeeded, especially for website software, browsers, operating systems, remote access tools and devices used by administrators.

Protect access

• Use multi-factor authentication for email, hosting, domain, website and administrator accounts.
• Remove old users, shared accounts and unused supplier access.
• Use separate administrator accounts and keep recovery methods secure.
• Review access after staff, supplier or project changes.

Plan for a compromised website

Ask your website maintainer how quickly suspicious activity would be detected, who would contact you, how the attacker would be removed and how a recent clean backup would be restored. Keep a simple incident contact list and test that backups are usable.

Check data and suppliers

Review companies that store or share customer and business data. Ask what security controls they use, how incidents are reported and whether their software remains supported. A supplier relationship should have an owner and a clear escalation path.

A useful action this week

Choose one critical website or cloud account. Confirm its owner, turn on stronger sign-in, check its update status and document how you would recover it. Small improvements become much more valuable when they are repeated and tested.

Sources

• Cyber.gov.au: Defending against AI-enabled cyber attacks
• Cyber.gov.au: Small business cyber security handbook
• Cyber.gov.au: Secure your website