It might be our nearest neighbour, rather than us, but its still a good indicator of the trends that we’re also seeing in New Zealand.
We have to remember that much cyber-crime is still not reported. Whether it’s out of embarrassment or commercial sensitivity, we know that it is the trends that matter. We can be very clear that the kind of activities that are reported in Australia are also happening here.
The Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) has released its annual report on key cyber security threats and trends for the 2020–21 (July to June).
The executive summary alone offers these highlights (or rather, lowlights) :
- There were 67,500 reports of cybercrime. That is an increase of 13% on last year
- This equates to one report of a cyber attack every 8 minutes.
- Of these, there were 1,500 pandemic related scams reported, and 75% resulted in the loss of money or personal information
- A higher proportion of incidents categorised as ‘substantial’ in impact.
- Cybercrime services – such as ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) – increasingly opens the market to growing numbers of malicious actors without significant technical expertise and without significant financial investment.
- Ransomware has grown in profile and impact, and poses one of the most significant threats to Australian organisations.
- Rapid exploitation of security vulnerabilities: State and criminal cyber actors continued to compromise large numbers of organisations by prosecuting publicly disclosed vulnerabilities at speed and scale
- Fraud and online shopping scams were the top reported crimes.