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Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity
Email attacks compromise 78% of organisations in 2025
Email breaches struck 78% of organisations worldwide in the past year, costing an average US$217,000 per incident to remediate, with Australian businesses facing a 48% uptick in attacks this year. Barracuda's newly released Email Security Breach Report surveyed 2,000 IT security decision-makers across nine countries and found 78% experienced an email security breach between April 2024 and May 2025, with 71% of those victims also getting hit with ransomware. Organisations taking over two hours to detect and contain an email breach were substantially more likely to face ransomware, with 64% of ransomware victims requiring extended remediation time. Average recovery costs hit $217,068 per breach, with smaller firms taking the worst beating. Companies with 50 to 100 employees paid $1,946 per employee to recover versus $243 per head for organisations with 1,000-2,000 staff. Detection speed matters: 58% of victims unaffected by ransomware detected breaches within an hour, compared to just 49% of those who also faced ransomware attacks.Inundated down underAustralian organisations have been hit harder than most, with claimed data breaches jumping 48% in 2025. Cyber researchers have recorded 71 breaches through to 3 Octob
Cybersecurity
Quantum computing threat scary, says Bullock
Financial institutions need to keep up with advances in quantum computing to protect Australians from fraud and scams, Reserve Bank of Australia Governor Michelle Bullock said. Bullock said this fight would require further innovation, adaptation and cooperation by the payments industry because fraudsters would not stand still in their efforts to steal data and money. “One important example is the need to protect card users against advances in quantum computing, which is expected to result in current encryption standards being broken sometime in the future,” she said in a speech. “This requires migrating card payments to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), a quantum-safe solution.” Answering questions after the speech, Bullock was asked if a quantum computer falling into the “wrong hands” was the biggest threat to the payments system. “Certainly it's something I worry about. If you believe what they say on the tin of quantum computing, what takes 200 years to decrypt now to break will take a matter of minutes. So it is a big threat,” Bullock said. Financial institutions used advanced encryption standards developed to meet the challenge of quantum computing to keep data safe, “but it's scary”. “So it is a wo
Cybersecurity
Stolen Qantas customer data flies onto the dark web
Qantas has revealed that stolen customer data has been released by cyber criminals. The Australian airline said it was investigating what data was released in the wake of the theft of 5.7 million customer records in July via a third-party platform. Most stolen records were name, email address and Frequent Flyer details, a smaller portion included business or home address, date of birth, phone number, gender and meal preferences but there were no credit card details, personal financial information or passport details. “There continues to be no impact to Qantas Frequent Flyer accounts. Passwords, PINs and login details were not accessed or compromised. The data that was stolen is not enough to gain access to these frequent flyer accounts,” Qantas said in a statement. The airline has an ongoing injunction through the NSW Supreme Court to prevent the stolen data being accessed, viewed, released, used, transmitted or published by anyone, including third parties. “We have also put in place additional security measures, increased training across our teams and strengthened system monitoring and detection since the incident occurred,” it said. Qantas advised all affected customers in July of the types of data in the impac
Cybersecurity
Trump calls on Microsoft to fire global affairs head
United States President Donald Trump has called for Microsoft to fire its global affairs president Lisa Monaco, calling her a “menace to U.S. National Security” due to her work for previous Democratic administrations. Monaco joined Microsoft in May. She was formerly a deputy attorney general during the Joe Biden administration and a national security aide during the Barack Obama administration, with Trump criticising her direction of investigations into his conduct. “Monaco has been shockingly hired as the President of Global Affairs for Microsoft, in a very senior role with access to Highly Sensitive Information. Monaco’s having that kind of access is unacceptable, and cannot be allowed to stand,” wrote Trump on Truth Social. “She is a menace to U.S. National Security, especially given the major contracts that Microsoft has with the United States Government,” he wrote. “It is my opinion that Microsoft should immediately terminate the employment of Lisa Monaco.” Microsoft has yet to comment. Trump has repeatedly criticised Monaco for Department of Justice probes into his conduct, saying in 2023 that she was among “the Radical Left Zealots and Thugs who have been working illegally for years to ‘take me down’”. She
Cybersecurity
ASPI argues Australia needs to improve research security
A new study published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) has found that Australia needs to improve its ‘research security’. The report was written by a senior law lecturer from Southern Cross University, Brendan Walker-Munro who said that while Australia made great strides in 2018 in terms of espionage and foreign interference, more needed to be done to keep up with more sophisticated adversaries. “Australia still lacks a clear, consistent national definition of ‘research security’ – a gap that has bred confusion, resistance and fatigue across the university and research sectors,” Walker-Munro said. “For many, security remains synonymous with red tape, rather than resilience.” Walker-Munro argues that the threats we face today are deliberate efforts to insert malicious insiders, target researchers through transnational repression, exploit data and cyber vulnerabilities, and manipulate legal frameworks through lawfare as opposed to data stealing or relationship cultivation. The current measures include introducing policy and legislative reforms aimed at protecting the research sector, and Walker-Munro said these should be considered as early steps. ASPI’s recent analysis argues that Australia’s re

Cybersecurity
Pro-Israeli hacking group responsible for $90m heist
An Israeli anti-Iranian hacking group has claimed a US$90 million heist on an Iranian cryptocurrency exchange. The group known as Gonjeshke Darande or Predatory Sparrow claimed on X to have destroyed data at Iran’s state-owned Bank Sepah amid increasing hostilities between Israel and Iran. According to blockchain analysis firm Elliptic, the money was sent from Nobitex wallets to hacker addresses. “The cyberattack on Nobitex was because it is a tool for financing terrorism and violating sanctions,” the group posted to X. “Association with such institutions will put your assets on the path to destruction.” Instead of pocketing $90 million worth of cryptocurrency, the hackers burned the funds to send a political message. “While we don’t expect to find strong technical links between Israel and Predatory Sparrow, the actions of the group align strongly with Israel’s regional priorities. You'd be hard pushed to find another candidate country in the region with the capability to perform these attacks,” director of threat intelligence at the cybersecurity firm Sophos, Rafe Pilling told the Guardian. Blockchain addresses or locations that record how much someone has are randomly generated strings of numbers and letters
Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity alert: NASCAR hit with ransomware leak
The Medusa ransomware gang has claimed another high-profile victim in NASCAR. NASCAR was listed by the group on their dark web leak site and demanded a US$4 million ransom, threatening to release internal data if the payment wasn’t made. According to Hackread.com, 37 documents NASCAR related documents have already been shared as proof. These documents included detailed maps of raceway grounds, email addresses, names and titles of staff, and credential-related information. The countdown on the Medusa blog says NASCAR has 10 days to pay the ransom. Other options would permit the company to extend the deadline for $100,000 per day or allow anyone to download the data immediately upon paying the $4 million ransom. NASCAR is yet to acknowledge the leak, however, NASCAR is a likely target for the group due to the large revenue they report every year. Medusa ransomware was first observed in 2022 and has been a prominent threat since 2023. Earlier this year, the CISA and FBI teamed up to issue a cybersecurity advisory against Medusa ransomware. Medusa is known to have hit at least 300 targets that include a variety of critical infrastructure sectors. Some other new victims include McFarland Commercial Insurance Servic
Cybersecurity
US$32bn deal: Google locks down Wiz cloud cybersecurity
Google has signed a binding agreement to purchase tech startup Wiz for US$32 billion cash to bolster its cloud security and add multicloud capability to its products and services. That's because organisations of all sizes - from start-ups and large enterprises to governments and public sector entities - can use Wiz to protect everything they build and run in the cloud. Multicloud capability is now essential for cybersecurity in the growing AI era and Wiz brings with it a US$700m revenue (which was tipped to soon hit US$1 billion) and cloud security customer base. The deal - which was rumoured to happen since mid-last year - is seen as a move to start competing with the dominant Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure, which hold a 30% and 21% share of the global cloud market each respectively, according to Statista. Wiz had last year walked away from a US$23 billion takeover by Google, saying it would pursue an IPO instead - however low capital interest in backing such a large public listing ahead of the U.S. election and now market downturn had quashed those hopes. “Google Cloud is a leader in cloud infrastructure, with deep AI expertise and a track record of industry-leading security innovation,” Google said.
Cybersecurity
X hit by massive cyber attack, origins still unknown
Elon Musk, CEO of X, said there is a "massive cyberattack" underway against his social platform. He posted to the platform late Monday (Tuesday AEDT) in the United States saying, “We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” he said, “Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved.” The company is in the process of “tracing” the attack which left the platform unresponsive for around 40,000 users who reported they had no access to the site. Downdetector, an outage monitoring site, received thousands of reports of outages that initially spiked around 6 am EST, returning to normal for a few hours, before a second surge was reported. Downdetector data indicated that 56% of the problems were reported for the X app, while 33% pertained to the website. Users saw a message that read “something went wrong” and told them to try reloading, but tweets that failed to appear. In an interview with Fox Business, Musk said it is still uncertain who was behind the attacks but allegedly came from “IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.” Musk has also been heavily critical of the Ukrainian government, recently claiming the country’s “entire front line” would collapse if he turned o