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A curfew imposed on more than two million people in the 12 Sydney suburbs hardest hit by the spread of the coronavirus Delta variant will end on Wednesday night, authorities said, stopping short of easing more lockdown restrictions.

Officials said first-dose COVID-19 vaccination levels have reached 80% of the New South Wales (NSW) adult population, while the dual-dose rate in Sydney's home state stands at 48% now. That's above the national average of 43%, but well below the 70% level that will trigger the easing of other curbs first imposed three months ago.

Authorities expect to achieve the 70% rate around the middle of next month, and plans to relax more restrictions once it has climbed to 80%.

"The stabilisation and decline in some areas of concern are pleasing and we are at a critical stage ... but the best advice we have is that it's too early and too risky to do anything further today," Premier Gladys Berejiklian said during a media conference in Sydney.

Despite recent Delta outbreaks, Australia's coronavirus numbers remain low compared with many other countries, with some 78,600 cases and 1,116 deaths.

Berejiklian warned it would be against the law for the unvaccinated to attend any public venues once the state hits 70%, when the fully vaccinated are promised more freedom.

"It's black and white. If you're not vaccinated, you can't go to a restaurant, you can't go to a cafe," she said, urging the unvaccinated to get their shots soon.

New South Wales, the epicentre of Australia's Delta outbreak, reported a slight rise in new infections to 1,259, the majority in Sydney, from 1,127 on Tuesday, and 12 deaths.

Australia is struggling to quell a third wave of infections that has hit its two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, and the capital Canberra, forcing nearly half the country's 25 million people into strict stay-at-home restrictions.

Neighbouring Victoria state on Wednesday said new cases fell for the second straight day to 423 new cases as its first-dose vaccination rate neared the 70% level, about a week ahead of schedule, where some curbs on travel limit and outdoor exercise will be eased.

Meanwhile Ballarat, a regional town 115 km (71 miles) northwest of Melbourne, will enter a one-week lockdown from Wednesday night after four new cases were detected, authorities said.

Melbourne, the state capital, is in an extended lockdown while most regional areas in Victoria came out of strict stay-at-home restrictions last week. (Reuters)

Australia reported on Wednesday a 13% jump in cyber crime in the past year, with about one incident in four targeting critical infrastructure and services as working from home during the pandemic made more people vulnerable to online attacks.

The Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) received one cybercrime report every eight minutes over the 12 months to June 30, 2021, it said in its annual report.

Hackers have switched their focus to people working remotely online, and used fear created by COVID-19 to actively target vulnerable people and health services to conduct espionage, and steal money and sensitive data, Assistant Minister of Defence Andrew Hastie said in a statement.

Ransomware incidents increased nearly 15%, with the health sector reporting the second-highest number of attacks.

Ransom software works by encrypting victims' data and typically hackers will offer victims a passcode - or a "key" - to retrieve it in return for cryptocurrency payments that can run into millions of dollars.

"Malicious cyber criminals are escalating their attacks on Australians," Hastie said.

In June last year, Australia said it was being targeted by a "sophisticated state-based cyber actor" with the attacks targeting all levels of the government, political parties and essential service providers. Sources told Reuters that Australia viewed China as the chief suspect, which Beijing has denied.

In July this year, the United States and its allies, including Australia, accused China of a global cyberespionage campaign, which Secretary of State Antony Blinken said posed "a major threat to our economic and national security". 

IDCare, which works with regulators to support identity theft victims, said the ACSC figures were the "tip of the iceberg" because many victims did not report to authorities. It said it had experienced a 47% jump in complaints so far in 2021, compared to 2020 which was itself a record year.

"The general indicators are that it's not slowing and is likely to increase," IDCare managing director David Lacey said.

"It's a perfect storm for scammers it's conditions that they love and thrive in." (Reuters)

Afghan youth rights activist Wazhma Sayle says she was shocked to see a photograph online, apparently of women dressed in black all-enveloping niqabs and gowns, staging a demonstration in support of the country's new Taliban rulers at Kabul University.

The 36-year-old, who is based in Sweden, later posted a photograph of herself on Twitter dressed in a bright green and silver dress captioned: "This is Afghan culture & how we dress! Anything less then this does not represent Afghan women!"

"It's a fight for our identity," Sayle said in a telephone interview. "I don't want to be identified the way Taliban showed me, I cannot tolerate that. These clothes, when I wear them, speak for where I come from."

Other Afghan women overseas have posted similar pictures, striking a chord in Kabul.

"At least they are able to tell the world that we, the women of Afghanistan, do not support the Taliban," said Fatima, a 22-year-old in the Afghan capital. "I cannot post such pictures or wear those kind of clothes here anymore. If I did, the Taliban would kill me."

Many women said they believed the purported protest, which has appeared on social media and in Western media, was staged and that several people dressed in the head-to-toe black burqa gowns were men. Reuters has not verified the authenticity of the pictures.

"It is good our women (overseas) were able to protest about it," said Khatima, another young woman in Kabul. "The reality is, the burqa is not representative of women in Afghanistan."

When the Taliban was in power two decades ago, women had to cover themselves from head to toe. Those who broke the rules sometimes suffered humiliation and public beatings by the Taliban's religious police.

While the new Taliban regime has promised to allow women more freedoms, there have been reports of women being barred from going to work, and some being beaten in recent weeks for protesting Taliban rule.

Universities have installed curtains inside classrooms to segregate men and women.

The online campaign with hashtags such as #DoNotTouchMyClothes and #AfghanistanCulture began when U.S.-based Afghan historian Bahar Jalali tweeted to criticise the black garments worn by the university demonstrators.

"No woman has ever dressed like this in the history of Afghanistan. This is utterly foreign and alien to Afghan culture," she said. 

Jalali then posted a photograph of herself in a green dress with the caption, "This is Afghan culture," and urged others to post too. Dozens of women did.

"We don’t want the Taliban to dictate what Afghan women are," said Lema Afzal, a 25-year-old Afghan student in Belgium.

Afzal, born in Afghanistan under the first Taliban rule that lasted from 1996 to 2001, said she was horrified when she saw the picture of the black-clad demonstrators.

Her mother had worn the long blue burqa gowns forced upon women at the time and found it hard to breathe or see from under them, she said.

"The picture made me worried that history is repeating itself. My mom’s family didn’t cover their heads at all in the 70s and 80s, when it was fancy to be wearing mini skirts in Afghanistan." (Reuters)

The foreign ministers of South Korea and China held talks in Seoul on Wednesday amid concerns over North Korea's recent missile test and stalled denuclearisation negotiations between Pyongyang and Washington.

The meeting came days after North Korea said it successfully tested a new, strategic long-range cruise missile last weekend, which analysts say could be the country's first such weapon with a nuclear capability. 

The test underscored steady progress in Pyongyang's weapons programme amid a deadlock over talks aimed at dismantling the North's nuclear and ballistic missile programmes in return for U.S. sanctions relief.

South Korea's Chung Eui-yong met Wang Yi, who is also a state councillor, on the second day of a two-day visit, Seoul's foreign ministry said.

Chung vowed to continue fostering peace with the North, expressing hopes that the upcoming Winter Olympics in Beijing could provide a chance to kick-start that effort.

"We expect China will consistently support our government's Korea peninsula peace process," he told Wang at the start of the talks.

"We wish that the Northeast Asia relay of the Olympics, from Pyeongchang in 2018 to Tokyo in 2021 to Beijing in 2022, will be held successfully as an epidemic-free, safe and peaceful Games."

Wang asked for further cooperation to expand common interests and "more quickly, stably and fully" strengthen diplomatic ties which mark their 30th anniversary next year.

Both sides held a separate meeting to map out steps to boost cultural exchanges, which have been scaled back in recent years amid China's backlash over a U.S. missile defence system installed in South Korea.

Seoul and Washington say the equipment is designed to counter North Korean missiles, but Beijing argues the system's powerful radar can penetrate into its territory.

On Tuesday, the chief nuclear negotiators of South Korea, the United States and Japan met in Tokyo, during which they agreed on the urgent need for dialogue and diplomacy to resume denuclearisation talks, according to South Korea's foreign ministry. 

The U.S. envoy, Sung Kim, said during the meeting that Washington has no hostile intent toward Pyongyang and hopes it will respond to offers for talks.

China, North Korea's sole major ally, has played a key role in efforts to press it to dismantle its nuclear programmes. (Reuters)