‘Malicious’ state-sponsored actors using AI drive increase in threats
Australia’s cybersecurity agency has recorded a 20 per cent uptick in hacks over the past year as state-sponsored actors were found to have targeted organisations.
For the Australian Signals Directorate, whose latest cybersecurity threat report was released overnight, everything changed in March.
New forms of AI are contributing to a surge in more, and possibly dangerous, cyber attacks. iStock
That was when United States-based AI companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI and their Chinese counterpart DeepSeek started releasing their so-called frontier models.
These incredibly powerful AI models are much quicker and smarter than the old versions.
ASD director-general Abigail Bradshaw said even though they helped her agency and others to identify and quickly fight back against cyberattacks, criminals and bad actors were also using them.
“They are creating enormous opportunities, but they are also enabling malicious cyber actors to identify vulnerabilities and to conduct attacks faster, at greater scale, and with greater precision than before,” she warned.
It comes just two weeks after hackers exploited an online system to raise the temperature in supermarket fridges in France.
The ASD notified almost 4500 businesses and government agencies of potentially malicious cyber activity in an 80 per cent increase from the previous year.
Meanwhile, the agency responded to more than 1500 incidents in a 20 per cent increase from the previous year and a 36 per cent rise over the past five years.
Bradshaw warned that it was “inevitable” that we are likely to see more disruption through data breaches or service interruptions.
“As the global security environment remains challenging, state-sponsored cyber actors will increasingly leverage AI to enhance the scale, speed, and effectiveness of their operation,” she said.
ASD Director-General Abigail Bradshaw Nine
Defence Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said the latest figures were a big jump from the previous year and signalled a changing environment.
“Malicious actors are now able to use AI to find vulnerabilities in the systems of companies of organisations, and to exploit them, and so this is a much more challenging environment that people are operating in,” he told Today.
The evolving threat has prompted the ASD to issue a warning for anyone running so-called legacy systems: if you or your company have an IT system that no longer offers updates or security patches, it’s time to pay for a new one or risk being hacked.
Marles said the findings reinforced the need for the government and industry to work together to strengthen cyber resilience.
“You’ve got to use AI as well. AI is a really important tool here in defending your systems,” he said.
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