One attack every six minutes: ASD warns hackers use advanced AI to pummel Australia’s cybersecurity

Criminals and state-sponsored hackers are using advanced Al technologies to disrupt cybersecurity defences with Australian authorities warning online vulnerabilities are now being detected at a rapidly increasing pace, particularly with ageing networks.

The Australian Signals Directorate has released its annual threat assessment revealing in the past financial year it responded to more than 1500 cybersecurity incidents, representing a 36 per cent rise over the past five years.

“Over the last year, frontier Al technologies have fundamentally changed the cybersecurity landscape,” ASD director-general Abigail Bradshaw warned while releasing the assessment.

The head of Australia’s cybersecurity agency also warned the technological shift “will only accelerate” and urged organisations to “take action to improve basic cyber-hygiene”.

“System security must be prioritised over system availability in order to deal with increased vulnerability discovery by Al models,” she said.

“They are creating enormous opportunities, but they are also enabling malicious cyber-actors to identify vulnerabilities and conduct attacks faster, at greater scale, and with greater precision than ever before.”

The Nightly understands that local authorities continue to monitor state-sponsored hackers in China and Russia as being the biggest source of attacks on this country.

During 2025-26, the ASD’s Australian Cyber Security Centre received more than 82,000 cybercrime reports, on average one every six minutes, with the self-reported costs of a cybercrime for medium businesses rising sharply to $141,300, up 45 per cent.

In the past week Australian government websites were caught up in a global cyber-emergency as hackers exploited a vulnerability with PHP, a widely used computing language that was discovered using AI.

Multiple cybersecurity agencies around the world urged organisations unable to apply fixes in time to consider taking their sites down, leading some bodies to take pages offline.

The ASD has again called for other government agencies, industry and operators of critical infrastructure to prioritise reducing legacy technology, implementing event logging, supply chain management and preparing for post-quantum cryptography.

“The less legacy technology exposed to the internet, the fewer opportunities malicious actors have to gain access,” ASD said.

“Progress on these priorities will strengthen Australia’s preparedness for increasingly sophisticated Al-enabled threats.”

In the past year the ASD’s Cyber Security Partnership program grew to more than 149,500 partners, while the Cyber Threat Intelligence Sharing platform distributed more than one million alerts for likely cyber-compromise incidents.

At the same time ASD published 76 alerts, advisories and publications on its home page, including a range of joint products with international partners.

“Our advice reflects the strength of Australia’s intelligence and cybersecurity partnerships across the Five Eyes, and our important partnership with industry network owners and ICT providers,” the ASD said.