Sarah Al-Khaldi: Cyber threats are growing in speed and scale alongside AI development. International co-operation is becoming increasingly important in protecting businesses, governments and individuals. CNA's Paul Sung spoke to Australia's Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Matt Thistlethwaite, about the evolving cyber threat landscape and efforts to strengthen regional cooperation against cybercrime.
Matt Thistlethwaite, Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade: What all nations are looking for is trusted technology, artificial intelligence systems that they know they can rely on. We all want our citizens, our businesses and our governments to benefit from the AI revolution, but at the same time, we want to keep people's personal and financial data safe, and we want to protect critical infrastructure. So I think it's importantly about trusted technology and nations working together in cooperation to build that trust.
Paul Sung, host: Artificial intelligence is giving cybercriminals increasingly sophisticated tools. Are governments keeping pace, or are we already falling behind?
Assistant Minister: We know that people and actors are using those tools to undertake cyber attacks. It's just the speed with which they are able to do it and the scale. So what we need to do is work together through that cooperation that I mentioned to ensure that we're using the technology as well to combat that threat. So really, we're talking about training the tech to defeat the tech and make sure that systems and operations, and indeed people's personal and private information, remain safe.
Sung: Talking about cybercrime across Southeast Asia, criminal syndicates continue to operate massive scam networks, often using trafficked victims. Why are these operations proving so difficult to shut down?
Assistant Minister: Yeah, it's an increasing challenge that we're facing, particularly in our region and in Southeast Asia. We've seen the prevalence of scam centres being set up, people being trafficked to operate those scam centres, and serious, very serious transnational crime being undertaken. Unfortunately, they're pervasive in their effects on citizens across the world. Australia has been working quite closely with our ASEAN partners to combat these scam centres. A good example of that is Operation Firestorm, which was a cooperation between the Thai Government and the Australian Federal Police to provide intelligence and information to disrupt a scam centre operation in Thailand. I was in Bangkok a couple of weeks ago, where I met with representatives of the Thai police and got a rundown on how that intelligence was shared and how that operation was disrupted. There were unfortunately hundreds of individuals who had been trafficked into a remote region and were being exploited, while being used to undertake scams throughout the world. So those cooperations are really important. That's all underpinned by the Bali Process, which is all about trying to combat people smuggling across Southeast Asia. We've actually added cybercrime to the remit of the Bali Process in 2023. So we're putting in place that architecture for greater regional cooperation to combat these scam centres.