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Despite the continued effectiveness of ransomware, Telstra says it expects the attacks to slow. Instead, hackers that gain access to businesses' systems will hang around undetected to deploy more profitable attacks such as "formjacking", which lets attackers grab customer credit card numbers as they pass through a retailer's system.

The report says 74 per cent of businesses believe they have strong systems in place to verify when a breach has occurred, but conversely 89 per cent of businesses also estimate security breaches went undetected in the past 12 months.

The survey also covered other countries around the world, and found that Australian businesses were quicker than many others to detect breaches, with 62 per cent of local respondents saying they had detected breaches within minutes or hours. This is compared to 50 per cent globally.

It also found that Australian businesses are being penalised a little less for failing with legislation obliging them to disclose security breaches. For Australian businesses, 55 per cent of those surveyed said they had received fines for being in breach of new legislation enacted in the past two years. In Europe, where the General Data Protection Regulation is in place, it was 63 per cent.