October is cyber security awareness month and cybercrime in Australia is on the rise!
In an annual report (viewable here) released by the Australian Signal Directorate (ASD), Australia saw an increase of cybercrime reports by 13% from the previous year with a total of 76,000 reports for the year. This is equal to a report every 7 minutes! The top reported crimes were fraud, online shopping and online banking (phishing) accounting for 54% of all reports.
Figure 1: Cybercrime reports by month for 2021–22 financial year compared with 2020–21 financial year – Source: ACSC Annual Cyber Threat Report
The average cost per cybercrime report was around $39,000 for a small business and up to $88,000 for a medium sized business, these costs increased on average by 14% compared to the previous year.
Reasons for these increases include:
- Malicious state actors exploiting vulnerabilities
- Australians having the highest median wealth per adult in the world
- Malicious actors persistently scanning for unpatched systems and targeting of worldwide critical infrastructure
With this information, now is a better time than ever to improve your cyber security and to train your team on how to practice safe measures in cyberspace.
In my next blog post, I’ll tell you how prevent 99% of these types of attacks.