A cyber awareness movement built for the bush.
Face-to-face, town by town — where the scams hit hardest and the support reaches last.
The missing link: real help understanding online security, for you and your family.
Your digital self is yours — your photos, your conversations, your records. Out here we look after our own. Same goes for your data.
For the other one in ten.
About nine in ten Australians live along the coast. The other one in ten fill the interior — people working the land, the towns holding the regions together, and First Nations communities who've been here longest. When the scam texts land and the branch has already closed, that one in ten is the last to get help and the first to get hit.
Cyber Bushies exists to close that gap — face to face, town by town, in plain English, for people with a property to run and no time for jargon.
And it's not only about scams. Your digital self is yours — your photos, your records, your conversations. We call that digital sovereignty: owning and controlling your whole digital life, not renting it back from someone who's forgotten you exist. Out here we look after our own. Same goes for your data.
Real help, not fear.
Plenty of websites will tell you to "stay vigilant." We'd rather show you the actual thing hitting people out here, and the five minutes it takes to stay ahead of it.
The scams that actually target the bush. Not phishing in the abstract — the specific ones. Fake buyers on Marketplace for cattle and machinery. Invoice fraud slipped into a hay, fuel or agronomy bill. Drought-relief and grant scams. Phone-banking scams hitting people whose branch closed, so they bank by phone now. A city awareness site can't write this — it doesn't know the saleyards exist.
- Check a link before you tap it. Long-press or hover to see where it really goes. If it's not the address you'd expect, don't touch it.
- Turn on two-factor (2FA) for your bank and email. It's the single biggest thing you can do, and it takes about five minutes.
- Verify the caller. Your bank will never rush you or ask for a code. Hang up and ring the number on your card — not the one they gave you.
- Slow the deal down. A buyer who won't inspect the cattle, or wants an odd payment method and to "sort the rest later," is telling you something.
- Know what to do after. If you've been caught, you're not the fool — the system is built to catch good people. Ring your bank straight away, then IDCARE (1800 595 160) and Scamwatch. You don't have to drive to a branch to start.
We'll post the messages going around as they land — the fake Australia Post "parcel" text, the ATO "refund," the bank "unusual activity" one — with the tell and the one thing to do. Get them by email below, or read the blog.
Built by someone who lives here.
I'm Brian Colyer. I live in Dalby, on the Western Downs — the country Cyber Bushies is for. I'm not a consultant flying in from the city to explain a place I've never lived in.
I came to this the long way: a background in cybersecurity, a late diagnosis that finally explained why I see systems the way I do, and a close-up view of how easily the people out here get forgotten — by big tech, by government, by services that keep pulling back to the coast. I've had my own privacy turned over. I know what it costs.
So I started Cyber Bushies to do one thing well: help the bush understand and take back its digital self. One conversation, one town at a time. No slide decks. A handshake, not thirty pages of fine print.
That's Porter beside me — my assistance dog, and the steadiest colleague I've got.
— Brian Colyer
First stop: Tara.
Cyber Bushies is built to be face to face, so that's where it starts — in a room, in a town on the Western Downs. First stop is Tara, later this year: a plain-English session on the scams doing the rounds and the simple things that keep you ahead of them. More towns to follow.
Want Cyber Bushies to come to your town, or the community you look after? Get in touch — that's how the map gets drawn.
Muster & Tally
Cyber Bushies' free front door is a tool called Muster & Tally. It keeps an eye on an NDIS budget the way a good bookkeeper would — watches where the money's going, tallies what's been spent, and flags what doesn't look right — so a participant or their family can see the whole picture without wrestling a spreadsheet.
It's built to be free to every participant — no catch, no upsell. We're building it now, and it'll open through Cyber Bushies when it's ready.
Free · in buildThe ground we stand on.
Cyber Bushies runs on a simple conviction: AI should magnify everyone, not just the top one percent. It's the same thing serious builders elsewhere are landing on independently — that the tools reshaping the world shouldn't skip the people who feed and hold the country together. We're not chasing a trend. We're saying a true thing, out loud, from inside the place it's about.
