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ECB2112 Security, Privacy & Ethics
NIT2201 IT Profession & Ethics
Tutorial 4: Security Issues
Security Issues
1. The Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) is responsible for holding annual online consumer surveys of Australian
and New Zealand residents. Each survey aims to obtain a snapshot of the public’s exposure to consumer scams and fraud,
and analyse this information to improve the prevention, detection, investigation and prosecution of scams.
The surveys ask respondents if in the past year they have been contacted by phone, SMS, email, letter, via the Internet and/or
in person by someone they did not know in relation to:
• having won a lottery or some other prize (lottery scams);
• a request for assistance to transfer money out of another country (such as Nigeria; advance fee frauds);
• a notification of an inheritance (inheritance scams);
• a request from a business to confirm personal details or passwords (phishing scams);
• a request to supply financial advice (financial advice scams);
• an opportunity to work from home (a front for money laundering; work from home scams);
• pursuing a personal relationship that turned out to be false (dating scams); and,
• other fraud types.
Australasian Consumer Fraud Taskforce: Results of the 2013 online consumer fraud survey
Technical and background paper series no.58
The full report of the survey can be found online at
https://www.aic.gov.au/publications/tbp/tbp58
In 2013, 1,059 people responded to the survey, of which 1035 responses were analysed because 25 participants
misunderstood the question so they were removed for the analysis. As in previous years, a high proportion of respondents
to the survey had received a scam invitation (97%), with just over a third of the respondents responding to the scam
invitation in some way.
The histogram shows the regions where the survey respondents lived.
