Overview
- The policing network published its 2025/2026 Asia and South Pacific Cyberthreat Assessment in mid‑June 2026 and said cybercrime now accounts for about 30% of recorded crime in more than half of the 18 surveyed jurisdictions.
- Private‑sector telemetry cited in the report shows more than 6.5 billion cyber threats were detected and mitigated across the region in 2024 and investigators recorded over 135,000 ransomware incidents that year.
- Interpol documents an industrial-scale scam economy in parts of Southeast Asia and the Pacific that uses scam compounds, generates close to $40 billion a year from investment, romance and job fraud, and has been linked to trafficking and forced labour.
- Criminals are increasingly using AI tools, voice cloning and deepfakes to scale phishing, impersonation and automated messaging, with deepfake discussion on criminal channels rising about 600% between February and June 2024.
- Many countries have started using AI for forensics and threat detection but Interpol warns uneven cyber maturity, weak cloud security and slow information sharing leave smaller states and critical services exposed and require whole‑of‑society action.