Food for thought with Zijin coincidentally setting up office in the same West Perth building as AVZ and the likes of tolate hiding in the walls for the CCP.
https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/e...-5-billion-a-year-asio-shows-us-the-receipts/
Espionage costs Australia more than $12.5 billion a year: ASIO shows us the receipts
Spying by nation states is not new, and despite our geography, Australia has never been immune. This was made abundantly clear in a unique study, released last night by Director-General of Security Mike Burgess. Thanks to this study, Australians now have a sophisticated estimate of the cost of espionage directed against our governments, businesses and universities: at least $12.5 billion in just a single year.
While giving the
26th annual Hawke lecture, Burgess was measured, but still frank in his disbelief at the mix of inertia, naivety and fatalism that Australians are demonstrating across sectors (not just across government departments) in response to the threat of espionage. Burgess outlined that on all levels—government, industry and individual—behavioural responses are key to arresting the threat, or at least mitigating it more effectively. This tells us we need to stop leaving the house unlocked while shouting down the street that we have valuables on the kitchen bench.
As the result of a unique study by the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) on behalf of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,
The Cost of Espionage does what it says on the tin: it uses the AIC’s well-practiced methodology for assessing the costs of serious and organised crime to estimate the costs of espionage. That cost amounts to $12.5 billion for 2023–24, capturing direct costs of known or suspected espionage, and public and private sector mitigation and response costs. In addition, the study estimates that effective mitigations and counter-espionage activities have prevented tens of billions of dollars’ worth of espionage costs.
As ASIO and the AIC highlight, these estimates are conservative. Using ASIO’s narrow definition of espionage—theft of Australian information, critically, by or for a foreign government that is seeking an advantage over Australia—the AIC broke down some estimates of costs across society and the economy:
—Cyber security incidents affecting larger businesses cost up to $1,193.8 million, while those affecting universities cost up to $14.5 million;
—State or state-sponsored insider threats cost the private sector up to $324.8 million and universities up to $25 million; and
—Cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property and trade secrets cost businesses up to $1,1901 million and universities $628 million.
Cost estimates also included (unitemised) cybersecurity costs for the federal government.
There is a danger that the eye-watering $12.5 billion figure could induce paralysis. If spying is so persistent, and the cost is so great, then why not shrug our shoulders? Is it not just the cost of doing business, including lucrative business with China?
It’s here that the prevented costs are so arresting, not least because their mirror image is the costs we are likely risking if mitigations fail. The AIC developed a series of scenarios to estimate these kinds of potential losses. This led to findings that an economy-wide, week-long disruption to industries dependent on digital technologies could cost Australia over $5.9 billion, and that trade secrets theft from a large, publicly listed Australian company could cost up to $887 million per incident.
Burgess also made clear that espionage takes wholly unexpected forms, highlighting the whole-of-nation challenge. This has included, for example, the theft of fruit tree branches from a sensitive Australian horticultural facility, resulting in foreign reverse engineering and replication of what took Australian scientists two decades of research and development.
And then there are those costs that simply won’t be found in a spreadsheet.
Espionage is not simply about stealing secrets. Whether through human agents, cyber intrusions, insider access, or open-source exploitation, espionage provides the intelligence needed for malign states to calibrate coercive strategies targeting our sovereignty, economic competitiveness and social cohesion. Modern espionage enables not just intelligence collection, but manipulation, disruption and strategic shaping. It doesn’t stop at the exfiltration of information. Increasingly, it’s about embedding influence and pre-positioning for strategic effect. Access is used not only to survey and monitor but to shape systems from within.
Cyber operations, legal commercial activities, academic partnerships and dual-use AI technologies now intersect to enable state-sponsored espionage at scale. Cyber intrusions silently map networks and exfiltrate data, open-source information is weaponised to tailor influence operations, and commercial espionage undermines the development of sovereign technologies.
In this hybrid threat landscape, espionage doesn’t just support state objectives; it powers them. It allows malign states to apply sustained pressure without crossing the threshold of armed conflict, leveraging ambiguity to avoid accountability. Understanding the true cost of espionage means recognising it as the enabler of a strategic environment where information is weaponised, trust is degraded and resilience is tested.
As international competition intensifies, malign states such as China and Russia should be expected to increasingly favour persistent access over one-off breaches. This includes embedding themselves in critical infrastructure, for example, to enable pre-positioned leverage.
For Australia, these risks have real consequences. Compromises in defence, research, or critical industries and infrastructure can have cascading national effects, from reputational damage and supply chain disruption to the erosion of societal trust, or as Burgess described it: ‘The potential loss of strategic advantage, sovereign decision-making and warfighting capacity’. This danger is greatly compounded by the potential costs of a compromise of the AUKUS program, which would expose Washington and London’s most sensitive secrets.
This only underscores Burgess’s
long-standing case for a national security approach that is genuinely national. The government’s current counter-espionage investments are delivering dividends. But as he reiterated, ‘Security is a shared responsibility, and in the prevailing threat environment, national security truly is national security—everybody’s business.’
We need to be clear: ASIO is the security service, but it’s not our security manager. Burgess gave practical advice applicable not just to espionage but to criminal theft, fraud, workplace accidents and equipment failures: ‘Understand the threat, identify the risk, manage the risk.’ All require a coherent, connected strategy across whole enterprises—people, places, technology and information.
The work of ASIO and the AIC in producing this report is vital. If ASIO’s job is to catch the spies, this report is about driving the national shift needed to make it harder for foreign spies to succeed in the first place. Quantifying the cost of espionage helps us all begin to close the gaps that malign states so effectively exploit.
