The Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) Friday reported they received 76,000 cybercrime reports between July 2021 and June 2022, an increase of 13 percent since last year.

In the third Annual Cyber Threat Report, the organisation broke down Australian cybercrime from the most recent financial year, reporting “an increase in the number and sophistication of cyber threats”. Cybercrime such as extortion, espionage and fraud were said to be “easier to replicate at a greater scale”.

According to the ACSC’s statistics, on average, a cybercrime was reported once every seven minutes in the last financial year, with over 25,000 calls to the Cyber Security Hotline, an increase of 15 percent from last year’s annual report. The top reported crimes were fraud cases in online shopping and online banking, constituting 54 percent of cybercrimes. The ACSC responded to over 1,100 cyber security incidents, blocking over 24 million malicious domain requests and taking down 29,000 brute force attacks against Australian servers. They also published thirteen new guides to help Australians and their small businesses improve their cyber security practices.

In their report, the ACSC theorised that Australia’s prosperity has attracted these cybercriminals. The 2021 Credit Suisse report labelled Australia as the country with the highest median wealth per adult in the world. In order to tackle this issue, “cyber defence must be a priority for all Australians”, said the ACSC. They highlighted their Essential Eight cyber security strategies as the most effective steps forward. These strategies were introduced in 2017 and help organisations protect themselves against cyber security threats. The Australian government have backed these methods through their ten year investment in the Australian Signals Directorate, which is said to “further harden Australia’s cyber defences in 2022–23 and beyond.”