Cyber attacks on Australian businesses and government increased by 20 per cent last year, according to a defence force intelligence unit.

The Australian Signals Directorate said the most commonly targeted sectors are banking and finance, resources and energy, defence capability and telecommunications.

"It's an arms race - it's a cyber arms race - where sometimes the bad guys will get a little bit ahead and sometimes the good guys will get a little bit ahead," said IT security consultant Wade Alcorn. The Commonwealth Bank, the country's biggest bank, receives millions of cyber attacks daily from organised crime and so-called 'hactivists' - people using hacking to further a social agenda.

According to CBA's chief of information security, Ben Heyes, the number of serious attacks are rapidly on the rise. "We're seeing the tools that are available for executing a cyber attack are becoming more widespread and becoming increasingly more sophisticated and, with that, we're seeing a large increase in the volume of attacks," he observed.

"We have categories of attacks that are designed to disrupt services and there are categories of attacks that are designed to gain access to an organisation's internal environment - to potentially withdraw from that intellectual property or data that's important."

New Cyber Security Centre

The Australian Government is taking the increase in attacks seriously - it opened the Australian Cyber Security Centre last November to co-locate defence intelligence agencies, the Attorney-General and the Australian Federal Police cyber units. This week Canberra will host a major cyber conference - bringing together experts from Australia and abroad.

According to the European Union's Law Enforcement Agency, victims lose more than 250 billion euros each year worldwide as a result of cyber crime - making it more profitable than the global trade in marijuana, cocaine and heroin combined. In February, it was discovered that up to $1 billion had been stolen from 100 banks around the world, including Australia.

Despite the breach, security experts say the finance industry is the Australian corporate leader in cyber security. "It's fair to say that finance is quite mature, finance has been facing cyber threats for quite a long time now - it's one of the most strongly positioned industries in Australia," said Wade Alcorn.

Find the full article here, originally appeared on ABC News Business website.