Australia has had its fair share of cyber attacks recently.
High profile breaches of the data of Optus and Medibank customers have thrust the issue of Australia's cyber security into the spotlight.
And now, the annual threat report from the Australian Cyber Security Centre shows that cybercrime is indeed on the rise.
Federal Minister for Cyber Security Clare O'Neil has told the A-B-C that cybercrime is now a major issue of national security.
"I don't think it'll be news to any Australian watching today that the state of our world has changed a lot. We've got the war in Ukraine, we've got threats in our region, cyber is going to be a core part of this. So it's not just about the frauds or the texts that you and I might receive, but, you know, real issues around the security of our country going forward. So this is a core national security focus of our government."
The report says that last financial year, a cybercrime was reported to authorities every seven minutes - up from eight minutes the year before.
That amounts to 76-thousand incidents of online crime in the 2020 to 21 financial year - an increase of 13 per cent.
The report doesn't cover the period in which the data of Optus and Medibank customers was stolen - the biggest cyber attacks in Australia so far.
Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Richard Marles has told Channel 7 that people need to take steps to protect themselves online.
"People have to be vigilant. It's not a matter of panicking here. But it is a matter of being really vigilant, making sure that you're updated with your your software, making sure that you have two factor authentication on your apps on the data that you keep making sure you're not clicking on links, where you don't know where they're from. All of these are really simple measures that people can take and make a huge difference. And I think people have got to understand that with this increase in cyber crime and cyber threat. It's really important that people are vigilant."
The report says that cyberspace has increasingly become a domain of warfare, naming Russia, China and Iran as state actors involved in cybercrime.
It says that worldwide, critical infrastructure has increasingly become a target for attack, putting essential services at risk.
