Displaying items by tag: Australian Signals Directorate

GUEST OPINION: Australia's recent budget ushers in the nation's 'biggest ever' cybersecurity spend, with $10 billion pledged to see electronic spy agency Australian Signals Directory (ASD) double in size and ramp up its ability to launch offensive cyber operations.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute has found that 17 countries are responsible for most of the disinformation spread through Twitter, none of which are from the Five Eyes grouping. Europe is largely absent too. Who knew?

The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS) has today begun hearing evidence from critical industries and government agencies on proposed new laws to protect Australia’s infrastructure from sophisticated cyber attacks.

It looks like the defence industry lobby group, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, is running low on funds. Nothing else can account for the surfacing of its executive director Peter Jennings on the opinion pages of The Australian, conjuring up a fictional version of a Chinese bid to grab Taiwan.

Four cloud companies have achieved Strategic Hosting Provider certification under the Federal Government's Hosting Certification Framework. One of them, Sliced Tech, was acquired by global consultancy Deloitte on Thursday.

A joint parliamentary committee has proposed that an amendment to the laws governing critical infrastructure be split up into two, in order to pass what it says are "urgent reforms".

Company News: Snowflake, the data cloud company, today announced it has completed an Information Security Registered Assessors Program (IRAP) assessment confirming that Snowflake's Data Cloud has achieved the Australian Government security status of 'Protected' on selected deployments.

Samsung Electronics has announced that the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) has released an "updated Security Configuration Guidance" that includes a range of new Samsung Galaxy devices which can now be used by Australian government departments and Critical Infrastructure agencies.

Only a quarter of Commonwealth entities have implemented the top four cyber security measures recommended by the Australian Signals Directorate six years after they became mandatory, an auditor's report says.

The Telecommunications Sector Security Reforms, put in place just after the Turnbull Government was toppled in 2018, have hit Huawei Australia hard, with the company losing 900 direct jobs, more than 1500 sub-contracting jobs and $100 million in R&D in Australia, the company claims in a submission to a parliamentary inquiry.

A review of Australia's intelligence agencies has recommended that the law governing the activities of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, the Australian Signals Directorate and the Australian Geospatial Intelligence Organisation should continue to distinguish between foreign intelligence and security intelligence.

Exactly why the Federal Government has decided to upgrade the COVIDSafe app after its abysmal showing as far as contact tracing is concerned is a mystery.

Six Australian intelligence organisations have "incidentally" collected data from the COVIDSafe app, according to a report from the watchdog, the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, issued on Monday.

The Australian Government-owned defence industry lobby group, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, appears to have spent oodles of American money on studies that are virulently anti-China, raising serious doubts over Canberra's claim that it has not picked a side in the battle for supremacy between the two global giants.

Canberra-based cloud provider Vault has told the government it has serious concerns that the data and cloud sector has no regulator even though it is the country's most critical infrastructure sector as it links to all critical infrastructure sectors.

Canberra-based secure cloud services provider Vault has welcomed the release of new guidelines for vendors to be assessed for their competence in delivering secure cloud services by either public or private sector entities.

The defence industry lobby group Australian Strategic Policy Institute is acting to ratchet up tensions with Australia's major trading partner China and using funds it gets from the Federal Government for this purpose, more than $20 million at last count, the Australian arm of the Chinese telecommunications equipment company Huawei Technologies says in a strongly-worded blog post.

The only logical conclusion that one can draw from the latest inspired effort from the defence industry lobby group, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute — calling for ISPs to provide a clean Internet — is that the good people at this institute have been smoking some very strong stuff.

The defence industry-funded lobby group, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, has many shortcomings. But it has numerous strong points too, chief among which is its unceasing ability to spread misinformation, propaganda and heighten the fear index in society.

The head of an Australian cloud company says the new arrangement for awarding contracts for hosting of top-secret government data have advantages over the older one where there was a fixed list of companies certified by the Australian Signals Directorate who could cast their hat in the ring and tout for business.