The Australian Signals Directorate's (ASD) Annual Cyber Threat Report for 2024-25 highlights the persistent threat of malicious cyber activity to the nation, underscoring the urgency of action by all Australians and Australian businesses to raise the nation's cyber defences.
This year's report illustrates how cyber criminals continue to impact many Australians, leveraging new technologies and techniques to expand their destructive attacks and cause widespread financial harm.
It also details how state cyber actors continue to target business and critical infrastructure, as well as all levels of Australian government, in an attempt to conduct espionage, steal sensitive data or posture for disruptive attacks. These findings make it critical that all Australian businesses develop robust business continuity plans for service disruptions caused by a cyber incident.
Key findings from the report include:
- ASD answered over 42,500 calls to the Australian Cyber Security Hotline, equating to around 116 calls per day.
- ASD responded to more than 1,200 cyber security incidents, an 11% increase from 2023-24.
- ASD received over 84,700 cybercrime reports, an average of one report every 6 minutes.
- The average self-reported cost of cybercrime per report for small business rose by 14 per cent to $56,600, while the cost to individuals rose 8% to $33,000.
The report highlights the importance of government and industry partnerships in combatting cyber threats through intelligence sharing, combining insights and capabilities to block and counter these threats. These partnerships enable us to identify emerging threats and help defend Australian organisations in advance of cyber attacks. Increased cyber security awareness is leading to greater collaboration across government and industry, as well as reporting of cyber incidents.
ASD's Cyber Security Partnership Program grew to over 133,000 partners and the Cyber Threat Intelligence Sharing network now shares millions of indicators of compromise with hundreds of Australian partners. All Australian businesses and organisations are encouraged to join ASD's Partnership Program at cyber.gov.au.
The Australian Government is working to prevent cybercriminals from targeting the nation through its investment in Project REDPSPICE, which has already doubled ASD's capacity to assist consenting private entities to uplift critical networks and counter malicious cyber activity.
