Australian Cyber Security Centre

It responded to more than 1,500 cybersecurity incidents and notified more than 4,400 Australian organizations of potentially malicious activity.

And this is something that probably a lot of people don't see, but often when we contact an organization that has been hacked or at least threat actors are claiming have been hacked, they will say, oh, yeah, the ASD told us or the ACSC reached out and told us.

That's an important part of what they do.

because it's not always obvious.

Story number four, artificial intelligence is making cyber attacks faster, more sophisticated and easier to launch, according to a new report from the Australian Signals Directorate.

The Australian Cyber Security Centre responded to more than 1,500 cyber security incidents in the past financial year.

That's up 20%.

The centre receives more than 82,000 cybercrime reports.

And because most websites actually do have this PHP database system running in the background, when there's a vulnerability that allows people to, you know, hackers to break into systems, they can do that and then not have anything stopping them from rifling through the information contained in the website.

And we even had the situation where the Australian Cyber Security Centre, which gave this warning, I mean, its website, part of the ASD, which is the Australian Signals Directorate, there's a website called cyber.gov.au.

They had to take the website down for 24 hours until the patches were made available because there was a chance that the government's own cybersecurity website could have been hacked.

So the only thing they could do was take it down.

How far back are we talking? Some of the early warnings mentioned PHP 5?

So early reporting, including from CertEU and the Australian Cyber Security Centre, said all versions from PHP 5 onwards could be affected.

That was before details were published, so treat it as a hedge rather than a precise range.

What's firm is the fixed list.

So we need to be very careful here.

Here's what I can say with confidence.

The Australian Cyber Security Centre said it was not aware of successful active exploitation within Australia.

No threat actor has been attributed.

Australia must accelerate the modernisation of its technology and cyber security foundations to protect the systems we rely on.

The Australian Cyber Security Centre responded to more than 1500 cyber security incidents during the 2025 financial year.

That number is rising by more than 20% year on year and more than 36% in the last five years.

All right, let's get into a busy city week with our News 24 chief political editor, Andrew Clennell.

There are two checks here.

Who is asking and what are they authorized to do? The Australian Cyber Security Center recommends verifying unusual payment requests through an independently verified contact detail and using approval processes for changes to payment information.

Now move that problem into an AI era.

An assistant might encounter instructions inside an email or a document that tries to redirect its behavior.