By Lucinda Garbutt-Young and Andrew Brown in Canberra

Australia’s threat level rating system will be overhauled at the same time as national intelligence agencies are brought together to tackle online radicalisation.

ASIO chief Mike Burgess will brief Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke in the coming days on a new system for estimating terrorism and extremist threat levels amid an ongoing review of the process.

“Effectively, what the review is seeking to work out is how we can have the simplest, most targeted way of being able to provide the community with accurate information that is easily digestible,” Mr Burke said.

He said he hoped all Five Eyes countries – Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States and New Zealand – would be able to implement similar ways of recording threat levels.

A Counter Terrorism Online Centre was opened in Sydney on Friday, which will track national security threats and extremism from a single hub.

The centre combines ASIO and the Australian Federal Police to monitor radicalisation and online terrorism threats.

The federal government set aside $74 million in May’s federal budget to set up the centre.

Experts have raised concern in recent months that threats on home soil may be underestimated.

Young men congregating online are becoming an increasing worry for intelligence agencies, given they can be radicalised in mere hours and are easily swayed by peer pressure.

“In a dynamic, diverse, and degraded security environment, radicalisation is occurring increasingly online, and extremists are engaging with each other behind the walls of encrypted chat groups,” Mr Burgess said.

“This means ASIO and our partners have to be online too.”

He said boys as young as 15 had been engaging in encrypted chats that praised neo-Nazis and mass killers, while Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett warned the nation was facing “terrorism 2.0”.

“Not all the lessons learnt over the past 20 years apply today because of the rapid shift in the online threat environment,” she told media at the centre’s opening on Friday.

“Too many kids are at the crossroads to crime. In part, this is because of the fertile hate breeding grounds where our youth live and play.”

The intelligence hub will be a single-entry point for overseas agencies to provide information about potential national security threats taking place online.

Mr Burgess said the hub will work with law enforcement agencies as part of investigations.

“In a security environment where radicalisation increasingly occurs online, and extremists increasingly engage with each other in encrypted chat groups, ASIO and our partners must be online too,” he said.

“Online operations are often the only way we can identify and engage with these individuals to understand their intent, capability, identity and targets.”

Operatives who will be part of the centre will be trained to identify potential terrorists or those at risk of being radicalised by extremist ideology.

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