What do you get when you combine malware, IP telephony and an offshore call centre? A new breed of brazen phishing scam designed to target unwary Windows users.

The global release of Microsoft’s Office 365 last week has raised a simple, sobering thought about dealing with US Cloud providers – they are subject to the US Patriot Act and the data they manage may be accessed by the US government regardless of where it is stored around the world. Before CIOs shun Cloud services altogether, let’s put the news in context.

Australia has moved a step closer to secure DNS services with the Australian .au Domain Administration (auDA) completing the assessment phase of the planned transition, but a final go-live data is yet to be decided.

The NSW government department tasked with the state’s data centre reform program, the Department of Services Technology and Administration, has the green light to procure a software package to support internal audit and corporate risk management.

People solely relying on patching and upgrades are leading themselves into a false sense of security and individual protection is no longer sufficient in the age of multi-vector attacks, according to the president of the Internet Industry Association of Australia.

Originally from Melbourne, Australia but now living in the US, Gavin Andresen is the technical lead of the Bitcoin virtual currency system. Started by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009, Bitcoin is a digital currency system consisting of an open source client and P2P network. The aim of the Bitcoin project is a decentralised, secure peer-to-peer currency system that does not rely on banks or central transaction processing authorities. To generate “Bitcoins” people on the network use a cross-platform, open source client developed in C++. In addition to the open source aspect of Bitcoin, there is now an emerging market in services around the cryptocurrency such as exchange portals and virtual clearing houses. Previously, the Open Source Identity series has featured interviews with Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson, Linux’s Linus Torvalds, Jan Schneider of Horde, Mark Spencer of Asterisk fame, Spine CMS creator Hendrick van Belleghem, Free Telephony Project founder David Rowe, and PulseAudio creator Lennart Poettering. This time we talk to Gavin Andresen about the new, decentralised approach to money – Bitcoin.

Earlier this month a press release lobbed into my inbox from Salesforce.com evangelising the environmental benefits of using public cloud computing. The idea has its merits, but the message bordered on demonising on-house infrastructure in a line that Salesforce.com needs to carefully tread.

Sydney-based serial entrepreneur and star of The Apprentice Australia, Mark Bouris, has launched a suite of IP-based, data centre access control systems to local customers in a partnership with cabling supplier Anixter.

Following a spate of complaints about its service levels and security standards, mobile carrier Vodafone has issued a statement of its ongoing engineering work and commitment to customers.

Data security is always top of mind for CIOs and CSOs, and there is no shortage of challenges when it comes to picking the right tool for the job. With network and software vulnerabilities growing at a perpetual rate, good security software can help defend against many of the large-scale threats that occur locally and from all over the Internet. In this edition of 5 open source things to watch, we take a look at security products that will guard against threats without robbing your kitty.

Vodafone has attempted to hose down concern about alleged data leaks by sending an e-mail to its customers stating their information, including credit card details, remains encrypted and secure.

The new paradigm of mobile banking carries with it inherent risks, but there’s no reason for consumers to be less confident about the security of their data if the right safeguards are in place, says the chief technology officer (CTO) of Westpac bank.

The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has made good on its promise to support Linux in its next-generation authentication software, dubbed AUSkey, with the reference distribution being Ubuntu with the Firefox Web browser.

Confidential information released via Wikileaks has sent governments around the world into a spin and put businesses on high alert but one Sydney-based software developer claims to have a solution to the perennial problem of data leakage.

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) will refresh its existing network services over the next 12 months to keep pace with growing disaster recovery requirements at its $38 million data centre.