Download it here, free, no form. The full control-level comparison of ASD’s December 2025 and June 2026 Information security manual releases, as a five-tab spreadsheet.
No email required. No form. It is derived entirely from two files ASD publishes publicly — and you should be able to check our arithmetic without giving us anything.
Why this exists
ASD publishes the ISM as a PDF, and as a set of machine-readable spreadsheets: the System security plan annex template and the Cloud controls matrix template. Almost everyone reads the PDF. Almost nobody opens the spreadsheet, and virtually nobody compares one release against the last.
We did. What surfaced is not a routine update.
What changed between December 2025 and June 2026
- Cyber security principles: 34 → 49. Eighteen added, three removed.
- The GOVERN function doubled, 7 → 14. No other function gained more than two.
- GOV-10 — System exposure minimisation was created from nothing. What you publicly disclose about your systems is now a governance principle.
- GOV-11 — Supplier cyber security assurance was promoted out of PROTECT (formerly PRO-03) and upgraded: suppliers must now be regularly independently verified.
- GOV-12 — Personnel suitability assurance was promoted out of PROTECT (formerly PRO-11) and upgraded: personnel are now subject to ongoing assurance.
- 29 controls added (nine in March 2026, twenty in June). One removed — ISM-1837.
- Of the ISM’s 1,101 controls, 126 map to the Essential Eight. The other 975 do not.
- Not one of the twenty controls added in June 2026 carries an Essential Eight mapping.
What is in the file
- Summary. Every figure above, with the December and June counts side by side.
- Principles Changed. All 18 additions and 3 removals, including the promotion trail: PRO-03 → GOV-11, PRO-11 → GOV-12, and PRO-02 absorbed into PRO-01.
- Controls Added. All 29, with revision, date, guideline, section, full description, and Essential Eight mapping.
- Controls Removed. ISM-1837 — the “password never expires” control, retired in line with ASD’s move away from forced password expiry.
- Not in Essential Eight. All 975 ISM controls that carry no Essential Eight mapping — the 89 per cent that no maturity score has ever measured.
The controls people keep missing
Filter the comparison by “added in June 2026” and the twenty new controls fall into two clean groups.
The human attack surface
Four brand-new controls — ISM-2104, 2105, 2106 and 2107 — direct organisations to advise personnel not to post information about their security clearances and briefings, to limit posting their work-related duties, to limit posting their skills and experience, and to use privacy settings on what they publish. That is LinkedIn, conference bios, GitHub profiles and recruitment advertisements naming your internal stack.
Artificial intelligence, on both sides of the line
Seven controls treat AI as a risk to contain: AI applications processing classified data must not reach external public sources (ISM-2112), must flag risky actions for human approval (ISM-2113), must have behavioural baselines (ISM-2114), and must securely delete chat prompts and outputs (ISM-2123). And as a capability to deploy: AI models are to augment detection (ISM-2117), vulnerability assessments and penetration tests (ISM-2119), and software security testing (ISM-2122).
Two others matter commercially. ISM-2116 now requires cyber threat intelligence services be used to support detection. ISM-2118 requires vulnerability assessments and penetration tests before deployment, before significant changes, and at least annually thereafter.
Neither carries an Essential Eight mapping.
The empty spreadsheet nobody has filled in
ASD also publishes a Cloud controls matrix template. Open it and you will find all 1,101 controls, and two columns that ship completely blank across every row: Provider Responsibility and Consumer Responsibility.
That is deliberate. ISM-1569, revised in June 2026, requires a shared responsibility model to be created, documented and shared between provider and consumer. The empty matrix is that model, unfilled. Ask who in your organisation has completed it for your material cloud services. In most, nobody has.
How to use it
- Board and audit committee reporting. The Summary tab answers a question most boards have never been asked: what proportion of the ISM are we actually reporting against?
- Gap analysis. The “Not in Essential Eight” tab is a ready-made scope for the controls your maturity assessment has never touched.
- Transition planning. ASD will retire the Essential Eight over roughly twenty-four months, replacing it with the Essentials series — which is grounded in the ISM. The comparison shows where ASD is actually building.
- Assessor preparation. An IRAP assessor works from the ISM, not from your maturity score.
A note on the ISM’s status: the ISM states plainly that an organisation is not required as a matter of law to comply with it unless legislation, or a direction under legislation or other lawful authority, compels them to. It is advice, not statute — but it is the advice ASD gives, the foundation the Essentials series is being built on, and the document an IRAP assessor works from.
Where this connects to Australian obligations
- CPS 234 requires information assets to be identified and classified by criticality, with controls commensurate with the threat. IDE-01 now names identities and credentials as assets.
- CPS 230, in force since 1 July 2026, requires management of risks arising from material service providers. GOV-11 says what that means: regularly independently verified. ISM-1738 says the right to verify must be exercised, not merely held.
- SOCI responsible entities operate risk-management programs premised on knowing what they run. IDE-05 (asset interdependencies) was added in the same release.
- PSPF-bound entities operate against the ISM directly. These changes apply now.