Report: Aussie journalists & human rights orgs coming under increasing cyber attack

Distributed Denial of Service attacks were the most common method of disruption, accounting for more than 80 per cent of all incidents. Still, other attacks sought to exploit website code or use malicious emails to bypass standard filters.

Unfortunately, Australian individuals and organisations are being targeted as well, with attacks steadily increasing, according to a breakdown of the overall numbers provided by Patrick Day, Head of Cloudflare Impact.

“During the period covered by the report, Cloudflare blocked about 38.5 billion malicious requests targeting civil society globally,” Day told Cyber Daily.

“Civil society organisations protected by Cloudflare in the Asia-Pacific accounted for roughly 18 per cent of worldwide attacks, about 6.9 billion total malicious requests, averaging 18.9 million per day.”

That figure is alarming because while Project Galileo supports 59 organisations globally, only 12 per cent are in the APAC region, with Australian orgs – such as socially responsible ticketing firm Humanitix and protest website Activist Rights – representing four per cent.

While attacks are rising locally, however, malicious activity targeting groups and individuals is on the rise across the globe, according to Day.

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“This year's report found that, in general, civil society organisations were targeted more frequently and often more intensely than other Internet users. For example, civil society organisations faced attempts to exploit security vulnerabilities in websites at a rate more than seven times higher than other Cloudflare customers,” Day said.

“Moreover, while most DDoS attacks Cloudflare mitigated for its customers were over within minutes, nearly every one of the largest attacks against civil society lasted longer, with some spanning days and weeks. These findings are consistent with previous Cloudflare research that found religious institutions, non-profits, and other civic groups were some of the most targeted in 2025.”

And while DDoS attacks can be bad enough, Day said they were often used to mask other activity.

“There is also evidence of attackers using multilayered attacks to target civil society,” Day said.

“For example, Cloudflare detected threat actors using a high-volume DDoS attack to mask simultaneous scanning for website vulnerabilities against a global environmental organisation during the same month as a major climate conference in Brazil.”

However, it appears that media organisations and the people who work for them are bearing the brunt of attacks.

“Journalists and news organisations continue to be disproportionately targeted,” Day said.

Journalists protected under the program accounted for 40.5 per cent of website vulnerability attacks, despite making up only 22.7 per cent of the underlying population.”