Acknowledgements
Good morning and thank you to the Australian Institute of Criminology's Deputy Director, Rick Brown, for the introduction. I'm pleased to be here for the 2025 Australian Institute of Criminology's annual conference.
I acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we meet today, the Ngunnawal people, and pay my respects to Elders, past and present. I also extend that respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people here today and thank Aunty Violet Sheridan for her Welcome to Country this morning
I would also like to acknowledge the international speakers who have joined us for this conference and in particular:
- Professor Rutger Leukfeldt from Leiden University, whom you heard from this morning,
- Professor Ethel Quayle from the University of Edinburgh,
- Professor Peter German from the International Centre for Criminal Law Reform and Criminal Justice Policy in Vancouver, Canada, and
- Gabrielle Gane from the Paris Psychology Centre.
Introduction
This year's conference theme - Reducing online harms - is one to which all Australians can relate, given the significant risk of cybercrime we are exposed to every time we go online.
While the internet has been a spectacular benefit to the world in so many ways, including increasing productivity, improving social connections and providing easy access to services and information in a way that has never before been possible, it has also brought with it risks few would have predicted when most of us first went online.
It's the job of all of us - government, regulators, industry and individuals - to do everything we can to ensure the internet remains a powerful force for good in society, and is not exploited to do us harm.
Scale of the problem
The annual Cyber Threat Report by the Australian Signals Directorate highlights the growing threat to Australia from cybercrime. In the last financial year, the Australian Signals Directorate's cyber security hotline received more than 36,700 calls - a 12 per cent increase on the previous year. And it received over 87,400 cybercrime reports through the online reporting tool ReportCyber.
But we know this is only the tip of the cybercrime iceberg and likely only represents the most serious cases where members of the public take action by reporting their victimisation.
A 2023 report by the AIC estimated that only about 22 per cent of victims of online frauds and scams reported their experience to the police or ReportCyber, and only 8 per cent reported when they were a victim of malware.
That report, based on the AIC's annual Australian Cybercrime Survey, also estimated that 47 per cent of online Australian adults experienced some form of cybercrime in 2023. That included:
- 27 per cent who were victims of online abuse and harassment,
- 22 per cent who experienced malware on their digital devices,
- 20 per cent who experienced identity crime and misuse, and
- 8 per cent who were the victims of online fraud and scams.
As this conference shows, even beyond these threats, there are many other forms of cybercrime risks that need to be addressed. These include online sexual exploitation of children, image-based abuse, radicalisation, recruitment into labour exploitation, ransomware and the abuse of artificial intelligence and other new technologies - to name just a few more.
And the threats keep evolving. In just the last two years for example, we have seen significant and concerning growth in the use of artificial intelligence to create child sexual abuse material, and coerce and extort young people into providing sexual images and videos.
Responses
The ever changing, and multifaceted nature of cybercrime, requires government and regulators to work tirelessly to counter the threat and to ensure our laws are up to date to keep the internet safe. That is why, over the past three years, the Australian Government has introduced a range of policies, programs and legislation to address these issues. I want to touch on some of the most significant reforms here.
In recognition of the role played by electronic service providers in allowing harmful content to be created and shared online, the eSafety Commissioner has been provided with additional tools and resources to ensure that Australians are safer online.
In November, Parliament passed the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024.
The law, which will take effect by December this year, places the onus on certain social media platforms - not young people or their parents - to take reasonable steps to prevent Australians under 16 years of age from having accounts.
Legislation also needs to keep pace with new technology that allows online harms to evolve and thrive. That is why I introduced new legislation creating criminal offences to ban the sharing of non-consensual deepfake sexually explicit material. The Criminal Code Amendment (Deepfake Sexual Material) Act 2024, which was passed by Parliament in August 2024, imposes serious criminal penalties on those who share sexually explicit material without consent. This includes material that is digitally created using artificial intelligence or other technology.
The production and sharing of such material can be a method of degrading, humiliating and dehumanising victims, most commonly targeted towards women and girls. This legislation makes it clear that such behaviour will not be tolerated by our society.
In 2023, the Australian Government invested $58 million to establish the National Anti-Scam Centre, based in the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. The National Anti-Scam Centre has already demonstrated its success in tackling by online scammers by improving data sharing between relevant agencies and bringing together experts in law enforcement, the private sector and government with a mandate to prevent and detect online scamming activity.
In 2024 there was a 33 per cent drop in scam losses by Australians, a reversal of the trend we inherited when coming to office. Scamwatch data also shows a 35 per cent decrease in losses to investment scams and a more than 30 per cent decrease in losses to romance scams.
Just last month Parliament passed landmark legislation to establish the Scams Prevention Framework with the world's toughest anti-scam laws, making Australia a harder target for scammers.
I also want to highlight the important work of the Australian Federal Police. Their partnership approach brings together Australian law enforcement, key industries and international partners, recognising that the response to cybercrime and the protection of online Australians is not just a law enforcement issue.
The AFP-led Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation - known as the ACCCE - plays a crucial role in combating child exploitation in Australia. The ACCCE does magnificent work to protect children by bringing together federal, state and territory agencies, industry and its international partners to counter the epidemic of child exploitation.
This partnership approach is replicated in the AFP-led Joint Policing Cybercrime Coordination Centre - known as JPC3 - which brings together the AFP, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission and state and territory law enforcement partners, to target high-harm and high-volume cybercrimes affecting the Australian community.
The JPC3 also coordinates prevention, education and awareness initiatives to protect and strengthen the Australian community against cybercrime threats and to ensure a nationally consistent way to raise awareness. Most recently JPC3's Prevention Team partnered with the National Anti-Scam Centre in a campaign that targeted high profile cybercrime matters, including romance scams and sextortion scams.
The emergence of 'ransomware-as-a-service' has allowed criminals with relatively low technical capability to deploy sophisticated attacks. In response to this growing threat, the AFP and the Australian Signals Directorate established Operation Aquila, to investigate, target and disrupt high priority cybercriminal syndicates, with a focus on ransomware threat groups. A key achievement under this Operation was the linking of Russian citizen and cybercriminal Aleksandr Ermakov to the compromise of Medibank Private in 2022. As a result, the Government subsequently imposed the first ever cyber sanction on Mr Ermakov for his role in the unauthorised release and publication of millions of records of personal information of Australians onto the dark web.
Through its annual Australian Cybercrime Survey, the AIC helps government keep track of and counter online threats by monitoring the prevalence of cybercrime and giving us greater insights into how particular forms of cybercrime are impacting the community.
This has included examining the extent to which being the victim of a data breach increases the risk of being a victim of online frauds and scams and identity crime - particularly pertinent following the 2022 Optus and Medibank data breaches.
The AIC has also looked into the experiences of ransomware victimisation, especially among the owners of small and medium-sized businesses.
Most recently, the AIC has used the survey to create a cybercrime harm index which ranks the harm caused to the community by different kinds of cybercrime, based on practical, social, health, financial and legal impacts on victims. This kind of innovative analysis helps us to prioritise preventative efforts towards the most harmful forms of cybercrime.
The AIC is also world-leading in its research on online sexual exploitation of children. Since 2022, the Institute has published 25 reports on child sexual abuse, helping to inform policy and practice on this rapidly changing issue. Most recently, this research has examined the prevalence and impacts of sextortion among young people, examined the use of artificial intelligence in child sexual abuse, and explored the intersection between viewing child sexual abuse material and accessing fringe and radical content online.
Conclusion
I commend the Australian Institute of Criminology on bringing together academics, law enforcement, government and private sector representatives from across Australia, and internationally, to discuss emerging patterns and trends and new approaches to addressing these problems. It is through these kinds of events, and the discussions they generate, that we can continue to evolve our national responses to these crimes.
