Rise In Financial Losses Reported To The NCSC

The National Cyber Security Centre’s Cyber Security Insights report for Q1 2025,  released 13 June, shows a 14.7% quarterly increase in financial loss reported by New Zealanders.  

For the period from 1 January to 31 March 2025, a total of 1,369 incidents were reported to the NCSC. Of these, 77 incidents were triaged for specialist support because they were of potential national significance.   

Financial losses of NZ$7.8 million were reported to the NCSC, compared with $6.8 million in the previous quarter.  

“This is the second-highest quarterly total loss figure the NCSC has ever recorded," said the NCSC’s Response and Investigations Team Lead, Tom Roberts. “Many of these losses again came from scams and fraud, particularly through business email compromise – where an attacker targets the email systems of a business to obtain money or information – and unauthorised money transfers. This is consistent with what we saw in the previous quarter.”  

“The true scale of losses is likely to be much greater, since we know only a small proportion of losses are reported to us,” said Mr. Roberts. “We urge people to be cautious online because bad actors are always waiting for an opportunity to steal money or information.”  

More than half of the losses reported to the NCSC were to businesses. "We have seen that cyber criminals are often targeting organisations that manage large financial transactions, like law firms and real estate agencies," said Mr. Roberts.  

“We encourage individuals and businesses to report incidents to us. Our staff have deep expertise in analysing cyber threats, and we can help people respond to and recover from incidents. The reports we receive also help us to gain a better picture of the current threat environment. This information shows us where we can best focus our efforts to protect New Zealanders online.”  

Key highlights from 1 January to 31 March 2025:

• 1,369 incident reports were recorded by the NCSC. Of these, 77 were triaged for specialist technical support because they were of potential national significance. 
• The remaining 1,292 were handled through the NCSC’s general triage process. These incidents were largely reported to the NCSC by individuals and businesses.  
• Compared to Q4 2024, this is an increase of 0.8% in total incident reports. 
• Direct financial loss was $7.8 million. This is a 14.7% increase compared to the previous quarter’s $6.8 million. This is the second-highest financial loss in a quarter ever recorded by the NCSC – the largest was $8.9 million recorded in Q3 2022. 
• There were 10 recorded incidents in which more than NZ$100k was lost. 
• With 486 total reports, Scams and Fraud was again the most reported incident category. The second-highest number by category was Phishing and Credential Harvesting, with 440 total incident reports. 

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