Government bolsters hotline as cyber crime soars

THE operators behind Australia’s national 24-hour cyber security hotline talk to people in some of their most emotional, frantic and frustrated moments.

“Sometimes the most interesting calls come through at 2am,” response team director Rita Erfurt said.

“We’ve had a phone call from a (government) minister in the early hours of the morning.

“It can be anybody saying, ‘I think my phone’s got a problem, I don’t know what to do’ all the way through to organisations ringing through to let us know they’ve got a cyber security incident.”

But Australian Cyber Security Centre head Abigail Bradshaw says the most heartbreaking calls are often from smallbusiness owners scammed by online criminals impersonating creditors. These email scams steal $50,000 on average, often too much for small traders to survive.

“If you’re a small to medium enterprise, losing $50,000 in one go can bring your business to its knees,” she said.

Now the hotline is getting a significant boost with more staff and more call lines to help cyber crime victims. Its HQ in a Canberra business park has been expanded to accommodate 30 service officers, in addition to a separate technical team.

The hotline’s expansion, part of the federal government’s $1.67bn cyber security strategy, follows a 310 per cent surge in phone calls to 1300 CYBER1 over the past year.

Ms Bradshaw blames a “deteriorating cyber security environment” for the increase that saw 67,500 incidents reported to the agency in the last financial year – equivalent to one report every eight minutes – and more than $33bn stolen.