Australia recorded 1,113 data breach notifications in 2024, the highest annual total since the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme commenced in 2018, and a 25% increase on the year before, according to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. In October, Australia’s Federal Court handed down its first civil penalty under the Privacy Act, AU$5.8 million, against a pathology provider after 86 gigabytes of sensitive patient records appeared on the dark web. The average cost of a data breach in Australia now sits at AU$4.26 million, according to IBM. In each case, the forensic question was the same: what data was taken, where did it live, and who had access to it. Most organisations could not answer quickly. Some could not answer at all. Even if they could the damage is done.
GuardWare today launched its Data-First Security Suite to address exactly that gap. Bringing together DISCOVER, INSIGHT and PROTECT, the suite is built around a single proposition: your data should be able to protect itself and encrypted so that even if it is stolen, it stays unreadable and access can be shut down instantly.
"Most organisations don't have a tooling problem. They have a visibility problem, Sensitive data spreads across M365, file shares, endpoints, project folders, and supplier hand-offs, then AI and automation increase the speed at which it can be found, copied, and shared. The question security leaders keep being asked, and cannot always answer, is: what data do we have, where is it, and what happens if it is taken?"
The GuardWare suite works as a deliberate sequence. DISCOVER scans data in place across file shares, endpoints, and Microsoft 365 without moving data or manual sampling. This produces a ranked list of what is sensitive, where it sits, and what to fix first. INSIGHT then provides continuous monitoring across every channel where leakage happens, USB devices, cloud drives, web, email, AI tools, and work-from-home environments, with real-time alerts and automated user education. PROTECT then persistently encrypts sensitive files at the individual file level, keeping data encrypted even while it is actively being worked on, so that if it is ever stolen, lost, or passed to an unauthorised party, it is completely unreadable and access can be revoked instantly from anywhere in the world.
Alan Rankins OAM, Executive Chairman of GuardWare, has seen the ah-ha moment when organisations first understand what the suite reveals.
"When a organisations runs the GuardWare Suite, they are absolutely startled by who in their company is accessing what data," he said. "But discovery is only the start. If you can encrypt data and still work on it, that is a game changer. The commercially sensitive, and classified information is protected. And if you haven't got the key, you can try and decrypt it for a thousand years and you won't be able to open that document."
Supply chain attacks are rising, and each one can cascade breaches across multiple downstream organisations. Human error now accounts for 37% of all Australian breach notifications, according to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, a reminder that not every incident is a sophisticated intrusion. PROTECT addresses both risks directly with persistent encryption that follows the file wherever it travels, across suppliers, contractors, and cloud environments, so the data remains worthless to anyone without the key, regardless of how it was lost or who took it.
“Most security tools are built to stop the breach. We built PROTECT for the moment after, when the data is already gone,” said Rizwan Mahmood, Co-Founder and CEO of GuardWare. “If the file is encrypted and only you hold the key, it doesn’t matter who has it or where it ends up. It makes stolen data useless.”
Together, DISCOVER, INSIGHT and PROTECT form a complete data-first security strategy: find what you have, watch where it goes, and ensure it can never be used against you.
About GuardWare
GuardWare is a sovereign Australian cybersecurity company focused on data-first security. GuardWare helps organisations produce a defensible view of where sensitive data lives, what it is, who can access it, how it moves, and what to fix first, so teams can act on evidence, not assumptions.
