Displaying items by tag: Department of Home Affairs

The Federal Minister for Home Affairs, Peter Dutton, and his office say that "ransomware continues to be a prevalent global threat, and cyber criminals pose a significant risk to Australians and Australian businesses."

One of Australia's main newspapers, the Sydney Morning Herald, believes that technology companies can open "very small" encryption backdoors to enable government agencies to snoop on encrypted communications.

Telecoms lobby group and peak industry body Communications Alliance has called on government to work together with the telecommunications industry to advance sector-specific critical infrastructure reforms.

Questions have been raised over the fact that the American cloud provider Amazon Web Services, which was given a Federal Government contract to store data collected by the government's COVIDSafe app, is using a data centre in Sydney which is fully owned by a Chinese company.

A number of Federal Government departments are unlikely to meet a September deadline set by the Department of Home Affairs to migrate their data from a company that is now totally Chinese owned to a new data centre.

Two-fifths of the respondents to a survey about the encryption law passed by the Coalition Government last year say they have lost sales or other commercial opportunities as a result of the law being in place.

The Australian Government wants to know what you look like when you are watching porn online so that it can use its face verification system to deny access to those below the legal age (which in this case is 16).

The Federal Government’s Department of Home Affairs has signed a new long-term contract with augmented identity solutions provider IDEMIA for the provision of its SmartGate solution as part of the traveller arrival process into Australia.

Cyber security firm Macquarie Government has launched a new security operations centre as-a-service (SOCaaS) which it says is aimed at addressing the evolving threat landscape faced by Australian government agencies.

Macquarie Government has called on the Australian Government to give greater focus to building critical sovereign capabilities in cyber security and IT to keep Australia competitive.

ASX-listed Canberra-based cyber security firm archTIS says it has had its professional consulting services and IT strategic advisory contract with the Department of Home Affairs extended for a year.

The Department of Home Affairs wants IP addresses, MAC addresses and port numbers to be added to the list of data retained by providers under the existing data retention regime, according to a submission made to a review of the law.

Submissions. Reviews. More submissions. More reviews. When it comes to the Coalition Government's encryption law, there has been no shortage of material published, from both the companies that are affected and the government.

The Department of Home Affairs says it is creating documentation to clarify the intended operation of the encryption law which was passed in December 2018, claiming that companies are concerned about it because they do not have a clear idea of their obligations under the law.

A number of Australian technology companies, led by the charity StartupAUS, have called on the Federal Government to make four changes in the encryption law that was passed last year.

The Australian Labor Party says it expects the matter of amendments to the encryption law passed last year will be taken up during the first sitting of Parliament this year, as agreed to by the government.

The Australian Federal Police says it is in the process of issuing technical assistance requests under the recently passed federal encryption law, and is discussing with the communications providers concerned what kind of assistance should be offered to them after the orders are issued.

All 17 amendments proposed to the Federal Government's encryption law, which was passed by Parliament on 6 December last year, have been implemented, the Department of Home Affairs says in a submission to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security.

A representative of the Department of Home Affairs claims that under the Federal Government'e encryption bill, companies cannot be asked to build in functionality into systems or devices to remove electronic protection.

The Federal Government will step up its bid to get its encryption bill passed in the last sitting fortnight of Parliament for the year, with Prime Minister Scott Morrison insisting that the new powers in the bill are needed to stop future terror attacks.