Australia

Hackers claiming to be part of the ‘hacktivist’ collective Anonymous have responded to Edward Snowden’s latest revelations about the NSA using Australian embassies to spy in Asia – by defacing the websites of scores of small Australian businesses.

A group calling itself Anonymous Indonesia replaced the front pages of over 200 websites with the .au address and the message “Stop spying on Indonesia!,” along with a selection of images of varying offensiveness.

Australia's security intelligence organisation (ASIO) is hiring a clutch of telecoms intelligence staff.

The agency is after a new “Assistant Director Telecommunications Interception” , a pair of ”Telecommunications Investigations Officers (we've linked to the better-paid of the two positions) and also a “Telecommunications Interceptions Specialist”.

The Assistant Director's job says the successful applicant's duties will include:

A gang of suspected Romanian criminals is using 3D printers and computer-aided design (CAD) to manufacture “sophisticated” ATM skimming devices used to fleece Sydney residents.

NSW Police recently arrested and charged a Romanian national with fraud after a money transfer officer contacted police over a suspicious transaction. Police said they established a dedicated taskforce to address the skimming issue in June after seeing an increase in alleged offences.

The director of the Federal Government's information security and foreign intelligence authority Ian McKenzie will wrap up a six year career leading the department when he retires in December.

McKenzie was appointed the director of the Australian Signals Directorate (until this May named the Defence Signals Directorate) in May 2007. In the four years prior he worked as the head of the Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation.

 Australia is lagging behind other parts of the world when it comes to the security of personal devices used on corporate networks, a new report has found.

The report, written by StolzNow Research on behalf of IronKey, sampled 207 IT business leaders in Australia, and a further 500 from the US, Canada, Germany and the United Kingdom. It found only 38 percent of organisations overseas allowed personal devices into the enterprise, compared to 77 percent of Australian organisations.

A Perth teenager who allegedly listed a new gaming console prototype on eBay before it was released has made a brief appearance in court.

The self professed "hacker", who was 17 at the time of the alleged crimes, faced the Perth Children's Court on Friday morning.

Security software vendor Symantec has sacked its Australian tech support team and outsourced the positions to India, as part of a global restructuring campaign.

Symantec announced a company-wide “organisational simplification initiative” in January, emphasising at the time it would be reducing executive and middle management positions, and reorganising its sales department. 

The metadata to be collected by the companies was said to help fight criminal activity.

The Australian government has temporarily abandoned plans that would have forced Internet and telephone data to be stored for up to two years, following an enquiry by the parliament which did not wish to go ahead with it.

Australian intelligence agencies have reportedly recieved "huge volumes" of "immensely valuable" intelligence data from the US, including from its PRISM program.

The PRISM programme came to light after a US Booz Allen staffer leaked a powerpoint presentation to the Washington Post and the Guardian which detailed how the US was spying on the communications of foreigners without use of a warrant.

The Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC), has told a hearing of the Australian Parliament's Senate Estimates committee that its attempt to block access to the IP address of one investment scam site could have blocked 250,000 sites in total.