PACIFIC enterprises must shift from traditional cybersecurity to complete digital and cyber resilience to survive an era where artificial intelligence is weaponising cyber threats, a conference in Nadi was told.
Speaking at the Pacific Fiber Conference 2026 at the Sheraton Fiji Golf Resort and Spa, Field CISCO and head of Cybersecurity Product at Philippines Telco Alexis Bernardino warned that legacy security practices are no longer enough to protect critical infrastructure.
“Now, resiliency is no longer a security KPI because right now, we are saying we need to be resilient, but no, it is now a business survival metric for all of us, for all of Fiji and the rest of the Pacific.”
Mr Bernadino highlighted significant advancements in frontier AI models released early this year that possess autonomous vulnerability discovery capabilities.
“During internal testing across major operating systems, thousands of zero day vulnerabilities surfaced, including flaws dating back three decades that had never been detected.
“Over 99 per cent of those discovered vulnerabilities were unpatched.”
Mr Bernardino said between February and April 2026, within a 60-day window, vulnerability exploit generation increased.
“In 2018, it took merely 2.3 years before a certain vulnerability could be exploited, but now in 2026, because of this development, it goes down to 16 hours.
“Meaning, before even the CVE is published for companies to patch it, it has been exploited already. Traditional patching is already obsolete.”
Mr Bernardino urged Pacific organisations and telecommunication operators to adopt active defence frameworks, build resilient multi-data centre architectures, and merge network and security operations into unified resilience operation centres.
He said these measures align with Fiji’s Cybercrime Act 2021 and the national cybersecurity strategy for digital acceleration, ensuring critical business and national infrastructure remain operational even while under attack.
