Cogito Group wins Australian Technologies Competition award as AI and quantum computing reshape digital trust

CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA, September 17, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Canberra cybersecurity company Cogito Group has won the Disaster, Emergency and Risk Management category at the Australian Technologies Competition finals in Sydney for SecureSME, a subscription service that finds, issues, renews and cancels the digital certificates and keys every organisation runs on.

The award, presented on 15 September at the competition's live pitch and awards night, recognises Australian technology businesses ready to grow into global markets.

Cogito Group co-founder and Director Bernadette Brown pitched SecureSME to a panel of 16 judges in five minutes by taking certificates away from a typical 3,000-person organisation and showing what fails, and in what order. Internal websites stop first. Smartcard users are locked out. The Wi-Fi goes dark floor by floor. Then the backup console and emergency access fail, because every tool needed to recover sits inside the network that has just disappeared.

"Competitions like this matter because they put Australian founders in front of judges who have built and sold companies, and they force you to explain your technology to people outside your own industry," Mrs Brown said. "We have spent fifteen years building this layer for governments and business. Standing in a room with 30 other Australian technology businesses, all of them solving hard problems, is a reminder of how much capability this country has."

The win comes as two forces in Australia are pushing digital trust from a background function to a board-level risk. The first is artificial intelligence. AI agents now log in to corporate systems, and each agent needs an identity it can prove. Every one of those identities' needs to have a certificate with an expiry date. The same tools give attackers a faster way to forge messages and impersonate people, which makes provenance, or proof of who sent what, and from where key to digital trust.

The second is quantum computing. The Australian Signals Directorate has issued advice that organisations must stop using today's public-key algorithms, including RSA and elliptic curve cryptography, by the end of 2030, with a transition plan in place in 2026 and migration under way by 2028.

"If your post-quantum plan is not locked in this year, you are already behind the timetable ASD has set," Cogito Group co-founder and Managing Director Richard Brown said. "Some boards treat this as a renewal. It is not. It means replacing every key on every device and every signed document in the organisation, and you cannot replace what you have not found. The first step is discovery, and most organisations have never counted their certificates."

Cogito Group issues hybrid and pure post-quantum certificates in production today from its own certificate authority, which achieved Common Criteria certification in April 2026. It is also listed by the United States National Information Assurance Partnership program as only one of four products to have achieved this certification.

"We are building PKI networks that are secure against quantum computers today," Mr Brown said. "Because the certificate authority and the lifecycle platform are both ours, a customer can discover, plan and migrate one domain at a time while everything else keeps running and even issuing. Where other platforms needs to start again from a green field, Cogito’s Jellyfish platform can move certificate authorities from other software live. It is doing this right now for customers, and it can do this again for PQC capabilities as well through to 2030."

Two certificate outages that we mentioned in our pitch to the judges show what is at stake when a date passes unnoticed. In December 2018, an expired certificate in O2's core network took 25 million mobile customers in the United Kingdom offline for most of a day. In February 2026, an expired certificate registered to a former employee took the Australian Senate's web services down for six hours. Nobody was hacked in either case.

SecureSME packages the platform Cogito Group built for government, called Jellyfish, into a subscription from US$399 a month, with delivery through managed service providers for smaller organisations. More than 10,000 business and government entities run on the Jellyfish certificate authority. Cogito Group is Australian owned, holds all three Gatekeeper accreditations from the Australian Government Department of Finance, and employs 37 people across Australia and New Zealand.

Organisations that want to know how many certificates they hold, and when each one expires, can request a discovery scan at https://securesme.com/.

Ends.

Media Contact:

Tom Finnigan

E: tom.finnigan@cogitogroup.net

M: +61 0408867367

About Cogito Group. Cogito Group is an Australian-owned cybersecurity company founded in Canberra in 2011. Its Jellyfish platform provides certificate authority, certificate lifecycle management, credential management and identity management in one system for government and enterprise customers across Australia, New Zealand and international markets. The Jellyfish Certificate Authority is Common Criteria certified and NIAP listed, and Cogito Group holds Gatekeeper accreditation as a certification, registration and validation authority.

www.cogitogroup.net

Tom Finnigan
Cogito Group
+61 408 867 367
tom.finnigan@cogitogroup.net
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