Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) and the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (AISC) - Scamwatch takedown trial 

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and the Australian Securities and Investment Commission are working together on detecting scams and disrupting their progress. Part of their work involves trialling the application of existing private enforcement software tools used for cyberattack and malicious website scanning and takedown of consumer facing scams.

Netcraft provides an automated detection service that it uses to discover fraud, potential cyberattacks and scams. The software can detect features common to potential scam activity such as fraudulent domains.

Machine learning techniques are then applied to this data to confirm whether the data patterns give a positive indication of a live threat. If confirmed, the software ‘disrupts’ the process by blocking sites, and issuing notices to web hosts who can then investigate and take down fraudulent sites. During the 21 day trial, the ACCC referred 1,757 web addresses to be analysed by Netcraft of which 381 were found to be malicious, and were subsequently removed.