Almost half of Australian internet users, victims of cybercrime: Govt report

Sydney, Aug 14 Almost half of Australian internet users were the victim of a cybercrime in the last 12 months, a government report published on Thursday said.

The report, which was compiled by the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) based on surveys of over 10,000 internet users, found that 47.4 per cent of respondents said they had been a victim of a cybercrime in the preceding 12 months.

Almost two-thirds of respondents, 63.9 per cent, said they had been a victim of at least one cybercrime in their lifetime.

Online abuse and harassment were the most common forms of cybercrime, affecting 26.8 per cent of survey participants in the last 12 months, followed by identity crime, malware, and fraud and scams, reports Xinhua news agency.

The most common type of fraud and scams reported over the 12-month period was victims paying money or providing sensitive information when they were trying to buy a product or service from a fake or fraudulent seller online.

Among all respondents, 20 per cent said they were victims of two or more types of cybercrimes in the 12 months prior to the survey.

The survey found that 50.7 per cent of Australians used different passwords for secure online accounts in 2024, down from 53.2 per cent in 2023.

The proportion of Australians who regularly updated their passwords on secure accounts, used a secure password manager and used password protection on their router also declined.

Earlier, in late July, Australia announced that it would include YouTube in its world-first social media ban for children younger than 16 after initially granting the platform an exemption.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Anika Wells, the minister for communications, said at a press conference in Canberra that the federal government has accepted a recommendation from its online safety regulator, the eSafety Commissioner, to include YouTube in the social media ban.

YouTube was initially granted an exemption from the ban, which will come into effect from December 10, due to its education and health content, but eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said in formal advice to the government in June that the platform exposes children to harmful content.

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor