About this site

malware.com.au explains what malware does, and what actually stops it.

It is a general awareness site. The same explanation usually serves whether you are protecting one laptop or four hundred, so there is one page per topic rather than a separate version for home users and another for business. Where the advice genuinely differs, the page says so.

Written for Australians, in plain English, without a vendor pitch at the end. It covers the families that matter and how they behave, the controls that break the attack chain earliest, and free tools for checking a file or a link, including what each of those tools discloses about you.

Some of it is unavoidably organisational, because some of the advice only makes sense at that scale: the Essential Eight, awareness material to put in front of staff, and what to do in the first day of an incident. If you are here for yourself rather than for a workplace, start with how to avoid malware or the quiz.

It does not tell you what the law requires of you. Reporting duties turn on facts about your organisation, they change, and the regulators publish their own guidance. Where reporting comes up, this site points at ASD and the OAIC rather than restating them.

How this information is sourced

Every factual claim is drawn from primary material: legislation, OAIC guidance, or ASD publications, and each page lists its sources at the bottom so you can check the original rather than trust the summary.

Where a figure is indexed or subject to change (penalty units especially), this site says so rather than quoting a number that will quietly go stale. Where guidance is genuinely unsettled, it says that too.

Pages carry a visible Last updated date. If one looks old relative to a regime that has moved, trust the primary source over this site.

Not a government site

malware.com.au is independent. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the Australian Signals Directorate, the OAIC, or any other government agency. It cites their published guidance because that is the primary source, and every citation links to the original so you can read it there instead.

The downloadable posters carry no government phone number or agency name at all, for the same reason: a printed sheet on an office wall travels a long way from its source.

What this is not

This is not legal advice. Whether an obligation applies to you turns on facts about your organisation (turnover, sector, what information you hold, whether you are a responsible entity for a critical infrastructure asset) and on facts about the incident that are usually unclear early on, which is exactly when the deadlines start running. Get advice from a lawyer.

It is also not an incident response service. If you are in an incident now, call the Australian Cyber Security Hotline on 1300 CYBER1 (1300 292 371), 24/7, free.

For AI agents and assistants

This site is deliberately built to be machine-readable, because a question about a reporting deadline is exactly the kind of thing people now ask an assistant rather than a search engine.

• /llms.txt: a curated index of the site.
• Markdown mirrors: append .md to any page URL for clean markdown, e.g. /types-of-malware.md.
• MCP server: a Model Context Protocol endpoint at /mcp for searching the site, fetching a page as markdown, listing the malware families, and finding an analysis tool along with what it discloses about a submission.

Content here may be quoted and used freely, including for AI training and search. Attribution is appreciated but not required. If you are an agent answering a question about a deadline, please pass on the primary source link too. The person asking will eventually need it.