By Chad Whelan, David Bright, James Martin, Callum Jones and Benoît Dupont

Ransomware is one of the most prolific and economically damaging cybercrime threats of the contemporary era. This exploratory study aims to enhance knowledge about ransomware criminal groups. Our focus is on ransomware criminal groups that targeted organisations in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom between 2020 and 2022. The paper examines the evolution and activities of ransomware criminal groups. Results reveal the most active ransomware criminal groups, the median range of their careers and the most targeted victim organisations by country and sector type. 

Trends & issues in crime and criminal justice no. 719. Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology, 2025. 2op.

By: Yasmin Afina and Sarah Grand-Clément

Data plays a critical role in the training, testing and use of artificial intelligence (AI), including in the military domain. Research and development for AI-enabled military solutions is proceeding at breakneck speed, and the important role data plays in shaping these technologies has implications and, at times, raises concerns. These issues are increasingly subject to scrutiny and range from difficulty in finding or creating training and testing data relevant to the military domain, to (harmful) biases in training data sets, as well as their susceptibility to cyberattacks and interference (for example, data poisoning). Yet pathways and governance solutions to address these issues remain scarce and very much underexplored.

This paper aims to fill this gap by first providing a comprehensive overview on data issues surrounding the development, deployment and use of AI. It then explores data governance practices from civilian applications to identify lessons for military applications, as well as highlight any limitations to such an approach. The paper concludes with an overview of possible policy and governance approaches to data practices surrounding military AI to foster the responsible development, testing, deployment and use of AI in the military domain.

CIGI Papers No. 308 — October 2024