Australia

 The head of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) has warned IT security challenges "pose one of the biggest threats of the decade", as the security landscape makes covert intelligence operations more difficult for agents.

Director-general Nick Warner said this week that despite the Federal Government spending "considerable resources" on boosting intelligence-gathering capabilities for ASIS and other Australian authorities, use of the internet and closed networks to collect information had become dangerous for the spy agency's staff.

A South Australian man is awaiting sentencing after hacking an ISP’s servers and threatening the owner with an axe.

Bryce Kingsley Quilley, 29, of Tailem Bend, appeared in the District Court today.

He pleaded guilty to three counts of unlawful modification of computer data, one aggravated count of threatening to cause harm and one aggravated count of threatening to damage property. Court documents show the offences occurred at Tailem Bend on June 14 last year.

The Australian Computer Emergency Response Team (AusCERT) has conceded losing a DVD containing the usernames and passwords of subscribers to the Federal Government's Stay Smart Online Alert Service in the mail.

AusCERT sent the disc — containing usernames, email addresses, passwords and recovery phrases — through Australia Post on April 11 but it was never received as intended by the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.

More than 15,000 Australian credit cards worth an estimated $3.75 million in total were salvaged from underground hacker forums in a global police sting.

The cards were held across 36 carding websites that used automated vending carts to sell the accounts in large batches.

Australia's Parliament is planning to investigate why it costs more to download software and other content in Australia than it does in other countries. 

The probe comes after a report on the situation released last year by the government Productivity Commission found significant price disparity between prices charged in Australia and in overseas markets. The controversy flared up again last week when Adobe Systems announced that Australians would be paying several hundred dollars more for its Creative Suite software than their American counterparts.

A former police officer that sought information on her ex-husband's finances from Australian Federal Police databases has failed to overturn her dismissal from the force.

The woman - who joined the AFP in June 2005 as a finance analyst before being promoted to an investigations role - had been embroiled in legal action over her divorce from Mr B, according to a Fair Work Australia decision.

Science Applications International Corporation has revealed plans to create a regional cyber security research and development centre in Melbourne.

The R&D centre will create 50 jobs over the next three years, according to a statement by the Victorian State Government.

The U.S. Department of Justice isn’t the only body suing Apple over alleged e-book pricing. Another slap came when 16 state attorneys general filed a suit against the company and three publishers in a multi-state suit.

And now Australia wants in on the action. Take two, as it were, as it was not long ago the country’s trade and competition regulator took a swipe at the iPhone and iPad maker.

A 17-year-old Dutch boy and an Australian teenager were arrested last week in their own countries on suspicion of hacking into servers, South Korea's Cyber Terror Response Centre said in a statement.

Former Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, has criticised suggestions that Huawei is somehow involved in cyber warfare after the Chinese vendor was blocked from bidding for NBN work over security fears.