Australia’s cybersecurity community relies on its leaders to share what they have learned, and the six below are regulars on the country’s conference circuit, from CyberCon Melbourne and CISO Sydney to Telstra’s own business events and RSAC. Their paths to the stage vary widely. One began as a weapons electrical engineering officer in the Royal Australian Navy. Another led an industrial cyber response to Stuxnet before moving to Sydney. A third co-founded Brisbane’s first conference built by security professionals for security professionals. Others came up through customer care centres, medical centre IT, and network engineering in New Zealand. Together they protect a national telecommunications provider, a global software group, an emergency service, and some of the country’s best-known organisations.
Craig Hancock – Global CISO, Telstra
Craig Hancock began his career as a weapons electrical engineering officer in the Royal Australian Navy, then worked as a senior communications engineer at Rockwell and Boeing. At Singtel Optus he rose to director of network operations, responsible for its network and IT systems, field delivery, and cybersecurity. Since joining Telstra in 2003, he has taken responsibility for the monitoring, management, and operation of all of Telstra’s network and IT systems and its customer network platforms, including incident management and network and IT security globally. As Security and Operations Executive, Global CISO, and CSO, he also leads Telstra’s field workforce and assurance call centres in Australia and overseas, and he has built and led Telstra’s cybersecurity team since its inception. He received CrowdStrike’s Excellence Award in 2019, was named Victorian Customer Service Executive of the Year in 2013, and won the AISA Cyber Security Enterprise Employer of the Year in 2023. Hancock holds a first-class honours degree in digital systems and communications engineering from RMIT, where he received the Ray Martin Prize for Engineering Design Excellence, and he was among the speakers at Telstra’s BC25 event in 2025.
Adam Cunningham – CISO, Vela APX
Adam Cunningham started as a systems administrator in Brisbane and secured infrastructure for more than 350 medical centres before moving through offensive security and specialist roles at NEXTDC, Tatts Group, and Deloitte, where he built a cyber intelligence capability aimed at executives rather than technical specialists. At Dimension Data he led a team of 50 and directed the One William Street project, the first all-of-government physical infrastructure-as-a-service implementation worldwide. As head of risk and security at UnitingCare Queensland, he helped deliver the first fully computerised hospital in Queensland. At Telstra he led security product engineering, growing the team from 60 to 175 and delivering two security solutions that generated $220 million in additional revenue. He went on to build red, purple, and black teaming practices as head of offensive security at IAG, served as CTO and CISO in the Australian Federal Government, and founded CyberPredictIT. Cunningham became CISO of Vela APX in June 2025, leading security across operations in more than six countries for the Vela Software and Constellation Software business. A longtime speaker at RSA Conference, Gartner IT Symposium, and BrisSec, he co-founded BrisSec while serving on AISA’s Brisbane executive committee, and he is on the speaker line-up for CyberCon Melbourne 2026, where he addresses how hardware vulnerabilities translate to executive liability.
Aiden Alp – CISO, Cyber Security Office
Aiden Alp spent a decade securing university networks in Iran, including a campus network with dedicated satellite internet at Tarbiat Modares University and infrastructure across 19 buildings at the University of Tabriz. At Sasol Polymers in Asaluyeh, he rose to IT operations and security manager and then manufacturing execution systems manager, where he led the response to Stuxnet. After moving to Sydney, he secured trading platforms for leading Australian financial firms at Patsystems and worked as a cybersecurity analyst at Western Sydney University. Over seven years at NSW Health, he became cybersecurity manager for Sydney Local Health District, securing infrastructure for more than 14,000 staff and 7 million patient records and managing the lifecycle of clinical AI systems. He also advised the Parliament of NSW as a member of its cybersecurity programme board. Alp has served as CISO at Cyber Security Office since April 2024, leading ISO 42001, ISO 27001, and SOC 2 implementations and building an agentic AI platform for investigations. He is on the speaker line-up for CyberCon Melbourne 2026.
Marc Karahasanoglu – CISO, NSW Rural Fire Service
Marc Karahasanoglu started as an IT technician and network engineer, then spent nearly six years as IT manager for Healthscope’s medical and oncology centres across NSW and the ACT. He joined Accor Plus in 2016 as a network engineer for the Asia Pacific region and spent nine years there, later serving as cybersecurity and network cloud engineer. He built the company’s cybersecurity roadmap, enforced two-factor authentication across its core platforms, rolled out SD-WAN across the region, and saved more than A$150,000 in AWS running costs over 12 months. Karahasanoglu became CISO of the NSW Rural Fire Service in June 2025 and spoke as a panellist at CISO Sydney in February 2026.
Adam Spight – Head of Cyber Security, RAC WA
Adam Spight worked in customer service at Optus while at university and spent four years managing the customer care centre at Amnet Broadband. He joined Vocus in Perth in 2016 and over six years moved from senior IT support through systems team lead, corporate IT manager, and systems operations manager to IT networks and security manager and then security operations manager, working between Perth and Melbourne. He joined RAC WA as cybersecurity operations lead, returned to Vocus as cybersecurity operations manager, and came back to RAC WA as head of cyber security in October 2024. Spight was a speaker at CyberCon 2026.
Sunil Rodhan – Group Head of Information Security and IT Risk, IPH Limited
Sunil Rodhan began as a network and systems engineer in India before moving to New Zealand in 2002, where he worked in a 24/7 security operations centre at Telecom New Zealand and rose to senior network security engineer. He spent more than a decade as a network and security architect for some of Australia’s largest organisations, including Westpac, AMP, Transport for NSW, and Woolworths Group, where he delivered a cloud secure web gateway and Zero Trust remote access. As global principal security architect at QBE Insurance, he advised C-level executives across APAC, the UK, and North America and drove around $15 million in multi-year security investment programmes. After leading security architecture at icare NSW, Rodhan became Group Head of Information Security and IT Risk at IPH Limited in October 2023. He spoke as a panellist at CISO Sydney in 2026.
Voices Worth Hearing
What sets these six apart is a willingness to bring their experience to the wider community. Hancock built Telstra’s cybersecurity team from its inception and shares that story on stage. Cunningham has spoken internationally for more than a decade and helped create a conference for his own city. Alp and Karahasanoglu bring perspectives from industrial security, healthcare, and emergency services, while Spight and Rodhan show how operations and architecture careers lead to the top security role. As Australia’s security challenges grow, leaders who teach as well as defend make the whole community stronger.
Discover more CISOs securing their organizations:
- Where Downtime Isn’t an Option: Healthcare’s CISOs to Watch
- Where the Fleet Comes Ashore: Virginia Beach’s Cybersecurity Leaders to Watch
- The Gate City’s CISOs to Watch
- Atlantic Edge: Portugal’s Cybersecurity Leaders to Watch
- Famously Hot, Seriously Secure: Columbia’s CISOs to Watch
John Kevin Hao is a news and feature writer covering cybersecurity, technology, and business targeted for professional audiences.