Australian workers fall for phishing attacks at almost double global rate

Australian workers are falling for bogus phishing attacks at almost twice the global rate, concerning research shows.

Australian workers are clicking on dodgy phishing attacks roughly twice as often as the global average, research from a cybersecurity software company has found.

Netskope finds five in every 1000 people clicking a phish link each month, well ahead of the global average of 2.9 per thousand.

Six per cent of Australian workers also violate their company’s data loss prevention policies each month. Malicious software is downloaded from cloud apps into the systems of 86 per cent of companies at least once a month. There are hundreds of offending platforms for these malware infiltrations, but GitHub, OneDrive and Amazon S3 are the most common because they are ubiquitous.

Australian workers are falling for phishing attacks regularly. Picture: iStock

Netskope Threat Labs director Ray Canzanese said employee behaviours and work habits constantly evolved, opening the door for more and varied threats.

“Our analysis illustrates this, with more recent threats such as genAI data leakage or cloud-delivered malware, and more ‘traditional approaches such as phishing and malicious web content both succeeding in putting Australian employees and organisations at risk,” he said.

“These challenges underscore the importance of implementing controls that inspect all types of traffic and instances on a network, from content being presented to end users, to how data is accessed and shared.”

The rapid change of working practices is leaving Australian businesses constantly having to defend cyber attacks. Picture: iStock

Violating your company’s data loss prevention policies can pull regulated data such as personal emails and phone numbers, and intellectual property and passwords to bad actors.

Generative AI apps like writing assistants, chatbots, and image and audio generators are being blocked by Australian businesses at an increasing rate. These apps make up a huge chunk of source code infiltrations.

The Netskope analysis shows 93 per cent of Australian organisations are using generative AI, up from 75 per cent a year ago. Australian organisations are blocking apps that serve no legitimate business purpose at a rate of 2.3 apps per month.

Netskope pulled anonymised data on a subset of consenting Australian customers for the research. The number of customers is not disclosed; however, Netskope used data collected over the course of 12 months to October 2024.

The multinational has a revenue of more than $760m worldwide.

Originally published as Australian workers fall for phishing attacks at almost double global rate