They say hindsight is 2020, and in this case, we're glad that 2020 is behind us. Fires and Viruses and Explosions (oh my!). During the course of the (ongoing) pandemic Australians, businesses and individuals saw an increased dependence on the internet - Working from home, accessing information and staying in touch with colleagues, friends and family. We saw many people lose their jobs and certain sectors struggle with the change and others collapse entirely. Due to the increased reliance on the internet, we also saw an increased attack surface and an increase in cybercrime activity. On a year-on-year basis the ACSC saw an increase in cybercrime reports of 13%, totalling some 67,500 reported incidents, roughly translating to 1 attack every 8 minutes and impacting every business sector and government agencies at all levels. An important takeaway is these are only the events we know about. The pandemic saw an acceleration in Cybercrime, but also in the sophistication of the attacks. Subnet has been developing a defence in depth strategy in alignment to ISO27001, ISM & Essential 8, and NIST frameworks to help our partners develop and grow their security through a step by step maturity journey.
The ACSC report identifies a couple of key attack trends and threats as follows: