SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA, July 14, 2026 Insicon Cyber, an award winning Australian and New Zealand cybersecurity advisory and managed services firm, today announced the extension of its AI Security and Governance practice with support from F5 (NASDAQ: FFIV), the global leader in delivering and securing every app and API. The addition of F5 AI Guardrails and F5 AI Red Team brings continuous runtime protection and adversarial testing capability to an advisory practice that is at the forefront of helping Australian and New Zealand organisations govern AI risk.
The announcement comes at a time of tension between AI adoption and public confidence. Recent research from the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) found just 4 per cent of Australians trust AI companies. The OAIC's Australian Community Attitudes to Privacy Survey (ACAPS) 2026 also found 87 per cent of Australians are more concerned about privacy today than they were five years ago.
"The AI trust gap is something every technology leader in Australia and New Zealand should take seriously. When only 4 per cent of Australians trust AI companies, the industry has a systemic credibility problem, and the organisations that solve it first will be the ones that succeed,” said Jason Baden, Regional Vice President, A/NZ at F5. “F5 AI Guardrails and AI Red Team were built to close this gap by giving enterprises genuine visibility and control over AI behaviour in production, and to surface vulnerabilities before they become incidents or headlines.”
This crisis of confidence comes as regulators across Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) raise expectations and signal enforcement where governance falls short. In April 2026, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) wrote to industry demanding a step change in how firms manage AI risk, warning that assurance practices aren’t keeping pace with the scale, speed, and complexity of AI adoption. Shortly after, The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) told boards they must actively oversee how AI risks feed into risk management frameworks.
Insicon Cyber's AI Security and Governance practice was established in early 2025 and has since been delivering ISO 42001 compliance projects, Managed Compliance programmes, and board-level AI governance advisory to organisations across A/NZ. With the addition of F5 AI Guardrails and F5 AI Red Team, Insicon Cyber now brings hands-on expertise in AI application testing to A/NZ organisations across all sectors, backed by F5's global platform and in-region support.
Recently, the firm completed its first joint AI security engagement with a large Australian organisation in the education sector, applying F5 AI Red Team and Guardrails capabilities to test and protect live AI applications in a complex, sensitive, and data-intensive environment.
“We have been helping organisations in A/NZ build ISO 42001-aligned governance frameworks and managed compliance programmes since early 2025 – before most advisers had even named this as a practice area. Adding F5 AI Guardrails and Red Teaming means we can now go further. In the last six weeks we completed our first joint engagement, testing live AI applications for a large organisation in the education sector. That work confirmed what we already believed: the governance framework and the runtime security have to work together. One without the other leaves real gaps,” said Matt Miller, Co-founder and CEO Insicon Cyber.
F5 AI Guardrails delivers comprehensive runtime security for AI models and agents, providing real-time protection against prompt injection attacks, jailbreak attempts, and sensitive data exfiltration from AI outputs. The solution is model-agnostic and supports flexible deployment, enabling organisations to enforce adaptive AI security policies as their AI estate evolves.
F5 AI Red Team complements the guardrails capability with automated adversarial testing of AI systems at scale, identifying both obvious and obscure vulnerabilities across the AI attack surface. The pairing creates a continuous test-and-defend cycle: AI Red Team surfaces vulnerabilities, and AI Guardrails transforms those findings into threat-informed runtime controls.
F5 AI Guardrails and F5 AI Red Team are available now as part of the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform, and are already deployed at regulated financial services and healthcare organisations globally.
The practice spans four core service areas for Australian and New Zealand organisations:
Insicon Cyber is an award winning Australian and New Zealand cybersecurity advisory and managed services firm, co-founded in 2013. Headquartered in North Sydney, the firm serves organisations across Australia and New Zealand in regulated sectors including financial services, aged care, and healthcare. Services include Board Cyber Advisory, CISO-as-a-Service, Managed Compliance (Essential Eight, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, NZISM), and a North Sydney based Security Operations Centre delivering 24/7 threat detection across both jurisdictions. Insicon Cyber is an ISO 27001 certified organisation with Australian data sovereignty.
For more information visit insiconcyber.com or LinkedIn
F5, Inc. (NASDAQ: FFIV) is the global leader that delivers and secures every app. Backed by three decades of expertise, F5 has built the industry’s premier platform—F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP)—to deliver and secure every app, every API, anywhere: on-premises, in the cloud, at the edge, and across hybrid, multicloud environments. F5 is committed to innovating and partnering with the world’s largest and most advanced organizations to deliver fast, available, and secure digital experiences. Together, we help each other thrive and bring a better digital world to life.
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