Proofpoint: How the AFL Secured Its Data with Proofpoint

Name: Proofpoint: How the AFL Secured Its Data with Proofpoint
Uploaded: 2026-07-07T09:42:15-04:00
Duration: 2 min 57 s
Description: The Australian Football League partners with Proofpoint to secure its data, protect its brand, and keep the trust of 700,000 participants and millions of fans. Defending the data that powers the AFL The Australian Football League (AFL) relies on Proofp...

Proofpoint

07/07/2026

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Transcript

the way to go. My name's Lachlan McGill. I'm the Cyber Security Manager at the Australian Football League. We're the number one sport in Australia. The cyber team's role is to, obviously, to protect the brand. It's one of the most recognizable brands in the country. We hold a lot of data on members, players, partners, staff, so the job of the cyber team is to protect all of that. We were a really valuable target, and we were seeing phishing emails getting through our defences on a regular basis. Proofpoint's been able to improve our security posture in a few ways. The first obvious one is, we're not spending hours and hours now responding to phishing email incidents. One, because there's much less of them than we had with our previous solution, and two, the platform is a lot easier to manage than what we had. Because we bought all those Proofpoint products, we obviously had that integration out of the box. Our experience with Proofpoint professional services and support has been really good. It took about a day to stand up the instance, and then three to four days to migrate all the configuration. The Proofpoint technical team was with us pretty much that whole time, guiding us, doing quality assessment on the configuration that we did, and it was that relationship and that level of engagement that we had from their engineers and from their salespeople is one of the main reasons why we chose the product. The use of AI at the AFL is obviously growing. It's a genuine concern for us, so most of the talk so far has been about how AI can help us in the sporting sense. More and more we're starting to talk about how can we make our business processes function better? How can we make staff function better and complement what we're trying to do? From what I've seen of what's coming down the pipeline with Proofpoint and AI, it's something that I'm pretty excited about. I'd love to be able to control what some of these agents are doing because context is really important. I don't think we can just give agents carte blanche permissions to everything. We've got to understand what they want to do at that point in time and understand the context. Something that genuinely concerns us as well is some of this prompt injection into emails and how we can protect ourselves in that space, and I think Proofpoint have something that covers off that area as well. I've experienced in the past with other vendors where you buy the product and three years later it's still exactly the same. With Proofpoint we're seeing those constant enhancements come down the pipeline and we're happy with where the development's going and the efficacy of the product is still market leading.

TL;DR

The AFL replaced its previous email security solution with Proofpoint after phishing emails were regularly bypassing defenses, significantly reducing incident response time.
Proofpoint's integrated product suite and professional services team enabled a full migration in approximately four to five days with hands-on engineering support throughout.
The AFL's Cyber Security Manager is actively evaluating AI risks — including prompt injection in email — and sees Proofpoint's AI roadmap as a credible response to those emerging threats.

Summary

In this customer testimonial, Lachlan McGill, Cyber Security Manager at the Australian Football League (AFL), explains why the organization chose Proofpoint to protect one of Australia's most recognized brands. The AFL manages sensitive data across members, players, partners, and staff — making it a high-value target for phishing attacks that were regularly bypassing its previous email security solution. After switching to Proofpoint, the AFL dramatically reduced phishing incidents and cut the time spent responding to email threats. McGill highlights the ease of platform management, seamless product integration out of the box, and the quality of Proofpoint's professional services team, which guided the AFL through a migration completed in under a week. Looking ahead, McGill expresses enthusiasm for Proofpoint's AI-driven roadmap while flagging real concerns around AI agent permissions and prompt injection attacks in email — areas he believes Proofpoint is actively addressing. The video closes with a strong endorsement: unlike other vendors whose products stagnate post-purchase, Proofpoint delivers continuous enhancements and maintains market-leading efficacy.

Chapters

0:00 - AFL Security Overview
0:34 - Phishing Problem & Proofpoint Switch
1:02 - Migration & Support Experience
1:39 - AI Risks and Proofpoint Roadmap

Key Quotes

0:00 "My advice to people was, if you want the best product and the best people, Proofpoint's the way to go."
0:34 "We were a really valuable target, and we were seeing phishing emails getting through our defences on a regular basis."
1:20 "The Proofpoint technical team was with us pretty much that whole time, guiding us, doing quality assessment on the configuration that we did."
2:14 "I don't think we can just give agents carte blanche permissions to everything. We've got to understand what they want to do at that point in time and understand the context."
2:42 "With Proofpoint we're seeing those constant enhancements come down the pipeline and we're happy with where the development's going and the efficacy of the product is still market leading."

FAQ

How long did it take the AFL to migrate to Proofpoint?

According to the AFL's Cyber Security Manager, it took approximately one day to stand up the Proofpoint instance and three to four additional days to migrate all configuration, with Proofpoint's technical team providing hands-on guidance throughout.

What specific security concerns is the AFL focused on as AI adoption grows?

The AFL is focused on controlling AI agent permissions and understanding context before granting access, as well as protecting against prompt injection attacks delivered via email — an area the AFL's security team believes Proofpoint is actively addressing.

Categories:

» Data Protection » Backup & Recovery
» Data Protection

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