The week in security: Government puts its cybersecurity money where its mouth is

The Labor government’s $1.46b commitment to boosting cybersecurity efforts was a significant investment in an area where the ‘good guys’ have often seemed hopelessly outgunned. The funding was welcomed by industry figures but, predictably, slammed by the Opposition as lacking detail.

Other countries were moving towards stronger cybersecurity protections, with US authorities urging Congress to pass new legislation and the UK signing up to the World Economic Forum cyber crime initiative.

All are trying to fight a changing threat profile that continues to challenge and frustrate efforts to protect or eradicate malicious online activities. While the good news is that spam levels are falling, the bad news is that 2013 will be filled with other kinds of cyber attacks, if a study by Verizon proves correct.

Yet spam hasn’t completely fallen out of favour with malicious-minded netizens, who are getting more creative as they execute plans such as hitting Australians with spam-carried Trojans in messages purporting to contain air tickets and advice from the ATO.

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Tags: cybersecurity, spam, privacy act, World Economic Forum cyber crime initiative, verizon, cloud security, government, malware, cyberattacks, trojans
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Security Awareness Tip

Incident handling is a vast topic, but here are a few tips for you to consider in your incident response. I hope you never have to use them, but the odds are at some point you will and I hope being ready saves you pain (or your job!).


  1. Have an incident response plan.

  2. Pre-define your incident response team 

  3. Define your approach: watch and learn or contain and recover.

  4. Pre-distribute call cards.

  5. Forensic and incident response data capture.

  6. Get your users on-side.

  7. Know how to report crimes and engage law enforcement. 

  8. Practice makes perfect.

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