A Cyber Attack Every Seven Minutes: How Does Australia Compare to Other Leading Nations?
Australia faces a sobering reality: the Australian Cyber Security Centre reports a cyber attack every seven minutes, amounting to over 200 incidents each day. The annual cost bleeds billions, disrupting operations, eroding trust, and placing unprecedented strain on economic stability. While other advanced economies face similar threats, the frequency and severity here highlight unique pressures on our financial and trade networks.
There is, however, reason for cautious optimism. According to the ACCC’s National Anti-Scam Centre, overall scam losses have declined in recent reporting periods, suggesting cross-sector collaboration is starting to shift the needle. Yet losses are trending upward again, with over $174 million reported in the first half of this year. Compared with global peers, B2B vulnerabilities, such as payment redirection scams, remain a persistent challenge.
Therefore, leaders and finance teams cannot wait for government action. Instead, they must act quickly to strengthen internal safeguards. In addition, they should apply real-time verification, multi-factor checks, and thorough supplier information cross-checks.
Lessons for Australia from Global Cyber Leaders
For example, other countries show that strong defences rely on more than isolated measures. Policies, industry practices, and cultural expectations must work together. Singapore offers a strong example through its Shared Responsibility Framework. It defines the duties of banks and telcos, along with mandating real-time transaction alerts and cooling-off periods.
Drawing on these sorts of international examples, Australia’s Scam Prevention Framework sets clearer fraud mitigation expectations for banks, telcos, and digital platforms. Consumer protection is a major focus of the framework, particularly vulnerable groups such as pensioners, and it has bolstered the national standard of protection.
However, the risks facing businesses – especially those managing large volumes of high-value payments – can’t be ignored. Cybercrime is too sophisticated, too multi-faceted, and too cross-functional for finance teams to rely solely on either the government or financial services institutions to protect their payments.
How Australia’s Scam Prevention Framework Fights Back
Despite these gaps in business-to-business protection, Australia has taken visible steps that have tamped down on what was once a rapidly ballooning amount of scam losses. Institutions are collaborating more closely, applying lessons from other countries and working together to stymy the flow of money to cybercriminals’ pockets.
Safeguards for Finance Teams
Unfortunately, fraudsters are good at exploiting the gaps between sectors, companies, and individuals. That includes gaps like the ones we often see between AP teams and IT teams – no organisation is perfectly aligned at all times, and scammers are just waiting to capitalise on siloes, uneven staff awareness, and splintered tech solutions.
Technology and Automation as Final Guardrails
The right technology can reduce vulnerabilities. Automating and centralising anti-fraud controls strengthens defences. Real-time alerts and multi-factor verification give employees tools to act fast.
These guardrails protect critical assets and processes. Embedding them in daily operations, alongside wider government and industry initiatives, can stop scams before they succeed.
The Road Ahead: Building Cyber Resilience in Australia
Staying ahead of cybercriminals starts with weaving security into everyday workflows rather than leaving it solely to IT teams. Automated checks catch issues early, while data-informed human oversight provides the visibility needed to flag suspicious activity. Verified external data further strengthens these measures, making it harder for fraud to slip through unnoticed.
When organisations collaborate closely with other businesses and the government, they create shared layers of defence that reinforce one another. Scalable solutions – like cross-checking supplier details in real time and multi-factor verification – help these protections keep pace with the volume and complexity of real-world threats, ensuring resilience even as attack tactics evolve.
The Scam Prevention Framework indicates a national commitment to tackling fraud at scale. By extending obligations across banks, telcos, and digital platforms, the framework also signals something else: cybercrime is complex, and it’s difficult to pin accountability on any one industry, sector, or institution. For finance teams, this complexity underscores the need for ongoing internal investment.
Australia has already shown it can mobilise quickly against cybercrime. The next step is moving from reactive fixes to proactive prevention and setting a new benchmark, worldwide, for staying resilient against the next generation of fraud.
This article was written by David Higgins, CTO at Eftsure.
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