Introduction
On Safer Internet Day, it’s worth recognising a simple reality: AI is reshaping the Internet in two directions at once. The same tools accelerating productivity and innovation are also industrialising cybercrime, making attacks faster to launch, cheaper to run, and harder to spot.
We’ve seen the impact in Australia. In 2024–25, the Australian Signals Directorate’s Australian Cyber Security Centre responded to over 1,200 cyber security incidents, with incidents involving DoS/DDoS attacks rising by more than 280%.
This matters because the Internet underpins almost every essential service Australians rely on—banking, healthcare, education, transport, and government. When attacks disrupt availability or compromise trust, the consequences are immediate: outages, fraud, delayed care, lost productivity, and higher costs. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner notes that IBM estimates the average cost to Australian businesses of a data breach was $4.26 million in 2024.
The AI Inflection
So, the question isn’t whether AI will change the internet, it already has. The question is whether we respond at the same speed and scale as the threats.
This is where platforms like Cloudflare can help raise the baseline for everyone. With data centres in major Australian cities, Cloudflare stops threats closer to their source. In 2025, Cloudflare mitigated 47.1 million DDoS attacks globally, including a record 31.4 Tbps attack—detected and blocked automatically. And as organisations deploy AI, capabilities like Cloudflare Email Security and Firewall for AI can help reduce phishing risk and protect AI applications from abuse and data exfiltration.
AI will make the Internet both safer and riskier. What determines the outcome is how quickly we modernise our cyber defences to stay ahead.
