Breachonomics Redux: Grant McKechnie on the Untold Cost of a Data Breach

On this episode of Cyber Voices, host David Savva-Willett is on the ground at Canberra CyberConnect 2026, AISA's inaugural event in the nation's capital, sitting down with Grant McKechnie for a conversation that CFOs and board members need to hear. Grant is Managing Partner at Cyber Resilience Group and a two-decade CISO veteran of Endeavour Group, Telstra and NBN. He was named one of the top 10 CISOs in Asia Pacific in 2022 and has built greenfield cyber security functions across some of Australia's most critical infrastructure. Today at CyberConnect he has returned with Breachonomics Redux, a follow up to the passion project he has been researching for the past four years on the untold economic and human impacts of a data breach. We get into the share price data behind major Australian and global breaches, from Medibank's 198 days back to parity to Live Nation's share price actually climbing after a breach affecting 560 million records. Grant unpacks why the market is becoming ambivalent, why Australian penalties never match the crime, and why trust and communications have overtaken share price as the impact he now leads with when advising boards. We also dig into how threat actors are adapting (including calling the regulators on their own victims), why information sharing has quietly gotten worse even as we appear to share more, the three critical first hires when building a cyber function from a blank page, the underrated art of finding a board sponsor before you need one, and the crucial difference between what belongs in an ARC pack versus a full board pack.  If you have a CFO or a board member in your life, this is the one to forward on