Cybersecurity Mentors Podcast · Cybersecurity Mentors

Lessons Learned From the Australian National University Breach with Suthagar Seevaratnam - Part 1

·48 min·3 clips

Suthagar tells Brian Schmidt, "this is the worst conversation you and I are ever going to have."

1. Cybersecurity Mentors Podcast focuses on the Australian National University breach and the lessons Suthagar Seevaratnam drew from it. 2. Suthagar Seevaratnam is the guest and a former CISO at ANU, while John hosts the conversation and frames the incident for a general cybersecurity audience. 3. The episode asks what a university breach reveals about leadership, incident response, and the human cost of security failures. 4. Suthagar says he did not start in cyber and began as an economist before moving into technology and security work in Australia. 5. He says work with the Australian Signals Directorate at the Department of Defense made cybersecurity feel like a natural fit. 6. He describes the job as protecting people and says the origin of "cyber" and "security" mattered to him. 7. Before ANU, he worked as general manager for IT operations at the Australian Bureau of Mineralogy and saw how people-centered response mattered after a breach there. 8. He says the Australian Cyber Security Centre asked him to go to ANU, where he became the first CISO. 9. He says the university had already suffered a breach, but staff were not talking about it when he arrived. 10. He compares breach response to organizational trauma and says silence makes recovery harder. 11. He brought in external companies to run a baseline threat hunt because he had no staff at the time. 12. That hunt found a second breach, which changed the work from preparation to active investigation. 13. He says he told Brian Schmidt immediately and used the line, "this is the worst conversation you and I are ever going to have." 14. He says Brian Schmidt responded by listening, asking what was known, and telling him to ask for whatever support he needed. 15. He remembers walking past the main library during mid-semester exams and feeling physically shaken by the thought of attacks on students. 16. He later said initial fears about vulnerable students turned out to be false and that the early picture was still "fog of war." 17. He says the team used a whiteboard, network forensics, and local knowledge to map the attack chain across a decentralized university environment. 18. He explains that a forwarded email preview triggered malicious code because the message rendered in the mail client and internal controls were incomplete. 19. He says the incident report was written for students and staff, then later mapped by Richard Gold against MITRE for a technical view. 20. The episode sounds like a practical interview with detailed incident-response storytelling and leadership reflection. 21. People interested in university cyber breaches, incident response, and executive decision-making will get the most from it. 22. People wanting a short, non-technical overview without breach detail may skip it.

As heard by us

A breach response becomes a grounded study of calm, controlled leadership when the hardest conversation arrives.

A breach response turns into a close look at how leadership sounds when the pressure is no longer abstract. Suthagar Sivaratnam recalls calling vice chancellor Brian Schmidt, getting time with him pretty much within the hour, and opening with the line that set the tone: this…

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Why you'd press play

You are put in the room for the call no leader wants to make: the urgent sit-down where a breach becomes real.

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