Dr Marthie Grobler

Principal Research Scientist

https://people.csiro.au/G/M/Marthie-Grobler

GATE 3 STORE, NORMANBY ROAD
CLAYTON VIC 3168 AUSTRALIA

Biography

Dr Marthie Grobler is a Principal Research Scientist at CSIRO. She is the Team Leader of the Cybersecurity Automation and Orchestration (CySA) team. Her expertise focuses on critical infrastructure resilience, cascading impacts across interdependent sectors, and the governance of cybersecurity risk, with particular attention to how human factors influence system resilience and decision making in complex environments. Marthie leads multiple national level projects examining national resilience and cascading impacts, co developed the Corporates Compromised® executive education program with the Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre, and works with senior executives on cybersecurity strategy development. She works directly with Australian and international governments to strengthen understanding of inter sector dependencies and to build national capability in critical infrastructure resilience, supporting more secure, adaptive and coordinated responses to evolving threats.

I focus on tackling national‑level challenges by uncovering hidden interdependencies across sectors and understanding the human role in complex systems, guided by my aim of making cybersecurity accessible for everyone. I welcome collaboration and conversations, and am open to delivering keynotes and guest lectures that bridge research, policy, and real‑world impact.

Other Interests

Key publications:

• Grobler, M., Romanach, L., Christopher, C., Qu, Y., Barnett, G. and Huber, M. (2026) The cyber-climate nexus: navigating dual threats to critical infrastructure and society.
In: Huber, M., Grobler, M. and Homan, R. (eds.) Critical infrastructure systems and extreme threat nexus: preparing for resilience and security. Cham: Springer, pp. 133–164. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-03-213169-0_4

• Baptista, M.D., Romanach, L., Chamikara, M.A.P., Lee, G., Tweddle, S., Kaur, S. and Grobler, M. (2026) Mapping critical infrastructure interdependencies for building resilience to climate and other risks.
In: Huber, M., Grobler, M. and Homan, R. (eds.) Critical infrastructure systems and extreme threat nexus: preparing for resilience and security. Cham: Springer, pp. 133–164. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-03-213169-0_4

• Aamir, T., Psaroulis, G., Grobler, M. and Janicke, H. (2026) From oversight to insight: transforming cybersecurity governance in boardrooms. In: Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’26), Barcelona, Spain, 13–17 April 2026. ACM, New York, NY, USA. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3791142

• Huang, Y., Grobler, M., Ferro, L.S., Psaroulis, G., Das, S., Wei, J. and Janicke, H. (2025) Systemization of knowledge (SoK): goals, coverage, and evaluation in cybersecurity and privacy games. In: Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25), Yokohama, Japan, 26 April–1 May 2025. ACM, New York, NY, USA. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713798

• Tang, L., Chen, X., Wen, S., Li, L., Grobler, M. and Xiang, Y. (2024) Demystifying the evolution of Android malware variants. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing. Available at: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10012345

• Whitty, M.T., Moustafa, N. and Grobler, M. (2024) Cybersecurity when working from home during COVID-19: considering the human factors. Journal of Cybersecurity, 10(1). Available at: https://academic.oup.com/cybersecurity/article/10/1/tyad024

• Aamir, T., Chhetri, M.B., Chamikara, M.A.P. and Grobler, M. (2023) Government mobile apps: analysing citizen feedback via app reviews. In: Proceedings of the 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2023). IEEE, pp. 1858–1863. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1109/ASE56229.2023.00190

• Nosouhi, M.R., Sood, K., Grobler, M. and Doss, R. (2022) Towards spoofing resistant next generation IoT networks. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, 17, pp. 1669–1683. Available at: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9714800

• Grobler, M., Gaire, R. and Nepal, S. (2021) User, usage and usability: redefining human-centric cyber security. Frontiers in Big Data, 4, 583723. Available at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fdata.2021.583723

• Wang, S., Nepal, S., Rudolph, C., Grobler, M., Chen, S. and Chen, T. (2020) Backdoor attacks against transfer learning with pre-trained deep learning models.
IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, 15(3), pp. 1526–1539. Available at: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8713897

• Nosouhi, M.R., Yu, S., Zhou, W., Grobler, M. and Keshtiar, H. (2020) Blockchain for secure location verification. Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, 136, pp. 40–51. Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0743731519308575

• Senarath, A., Grobler, M. and Arachchilage, N.A.G. (2019) Will they use it or not? Investigating software developers’ intention to follow privacy engineering methodologies. ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security, 22(4). Available at: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3359785

• Camp, L.J., Grobler, M., Jang-Jaccard, J., Probst, C., Renaud, K. and Watters, P. (2019)
Conceptualizing human resilience in the face of the global epidemiology of cyber attacks. In: Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). Available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10125/59914

Professional Areas

Fields of Research

Current

Current Roles

Team leader: Cybersecurity Automation and Orchestration

Academic Qualifications

2012

Certified Information Security Manager
ISACA
2010

PhD Computer Science
University of Johannesburg
2007

M.Sc Computer Science cum laude
University of Johannesburg
2005

B.Sc Honours Computer Science cum laude
University of Johannesburg
2004

B.Sc Finance (Information Technology)
Rand Afrikaans University

Professional Experiences

2021-current

Principal Research Scientist
CSIRO
2020-2021

Deputy Research Director: Software and Computational Systems
CSIRO
2017-2021

Senior Research Scientist
CSIRO
2015-2017

Principal Researcher
Council for Scientific and Industrial Research
2010-2015

Senior Researcher
Council for Scientific and Industrial Research
2008-2010

Researcher
Council for Scientific and Industrial Research