Category: Technology

Australia will fine internet platforms up to five percent of their global revenue for failing to prevent the spread of misinformation online, joining a worldwide push to rein in borderless tech giants but angering free speech advocates. The government said it would make tech platforms set codes of conduct governing how they stop dangerous falsehoods spreading, to be approved by a regulator. The regulator would set its own standard if a platform failed to do so, then fine companies for non-compliance. The legislation targets false content that hurts election integrity or public health, calls for denouncing a group or injuring ... Read more

The government’s use of artificial intelligence is set to be examined by a wide-ranging new federal inquiry. The Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit (JCPAA) – whose remit is to “hold Commonwealth agencies to account” – said Thursday that it was aware of increased AI adoption by the public sector, “but also a lack of adequate governance frameworks to regulate and monitor this use.” The inquiry will seek to identify current, planned and future uses of AI by public sector entities, and review whether “existing legislative, regulatory and policy frameworks that are relevant to the use of AI … are ... Read more

The Australian Taxation Office is to buy software to enable “unattributable exploration” of social media and of “surface, deep and dark” web properties. The software is intended to build on work commenced last year to introduce open-source intelligence or OSINT tooling to assist in protecting Australia’s tax and superannuation systems. The tax office said in tender documents overnight that OSINT had already allowed it “to take proactive steps to protect Commonwealth revenue and the integrity of the superannuation and taxation systems.” It now wants one or more OSINT tools to support intelligence, operational and data science use cases. “Several dedicated ... Read more

Qantas is tackling a broad range of cyber security activities this financial year, including embedding secure-by-design practices across the group and automating “key cyber capability”. The aviation group outlined a significantly expanded body of cyber security work in its 2024 sustainability report [pdf] compared to previous years. In the previous two years, cyber safety culture, awareness and training-related activity dominated its disclosures, with only scant mention of process and technology-related investments. Its latest sustainability report continues with that theme, pointing to phishing simulations and bespoke training programs being offered to the airline’s staff. However, it also points to a number ... Read more

Transurban is using artificial intelligence to help it bill toll road users whose e-tags aren’t detected or recognised as the vehicle passes under a collection point. Artak Amirbekyan, Transurban The toll road operator has built an “auto-correction” AI model to identify vehicles missed by its e-tag system. Operational on Transurban’s toll roads across Australia, the AI model analyses imagery from automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) cameras to identify a car’s make, number plate and location, which is then combined with other customer data to determine where to send an invoice. This, according to Transurban’s head of data, AI ... Read more

The complexity of access has become a major challenge that is keeping CISOs up at night. Unfortunately, while the solutions to address the problem are available, many have yet to properly build them into their security environment. Forrester Research has estimated that 80% of breaches involve compromised or abused privileged accounts. Yet, just are sharing root and privileged access. This needs to change, especially given the increasing scrutiny on cyber security best practices in Australia. The Evolving Cybersecurity Landscape in Australia Ransomware remains one of the most prevalent and damaging threats to Australian businesses and critical infrastructure. The impact of ... Read more

The inaugural iTnews Benchmark Awards: Security  will celebrate the work of Australian security leaders including CISOs and CSOs for their work in driving effective cyber programs. iTnews is proud to announce over 50 finalists across end user Australian organisations including in government, healthcare, financial services, retail, telecommunications, industrial, education, energy and not for profit sectors. The awards will be presented at a gala dinner and conference on the October 16 at the Shangri-La Hotel in Sydney. Register your interest in attending the iTnews Benchmark Security conference and awards. This year’s awards are sponsored by AUSCERT, Mimecast, NinjaOne, Skybox Security and ... Read more

Oracle shares rose more than 10 percent as a push to embed AI into its cloud service products boosted its first-quarter results and helped it narrow the gap with market leaders. Despite being a late entrant to the cloud business, the company’s rapid AI investments has made its software an attractive option for companies looking to streamline operations. Revenue from its cloud products, seen as a less expensive option compared to that of Microsoft and Amazon, rose 21 percent to US$5.6 billion ($8.4 billion) in the first quarter, while its overall revenue of US$13.31 billion beat estimates. Stifel analysts said ... Read more

News Corp explored switching away from Google’s advertising tools in 2017 but estimated that doing so would lose the Wall Street Journal publisher at least US$9 million ($13.5 million) in ad revenue, a former executive testified at Google’s antitrust trial in Virginia. Google frustrated publishers by introducing features that benefited itself more than them, said Stephanie Layser, who worked in advertising technology at News Corp from 2017 to 2022. Despite those concerns, almost no one in the publishing industry used anything else, because Google’s publisher ad server is tied to Google’s ad exchange, she said. “I felt like they were ... Read more

Nine Entertainment blocked up to 96 million web requests from bots and potentially malicious traffic during this year’s Paris Olympics. The media organisation’s Fastly web application firewall filters 1.2 billion daily web and application requests, including on its brands the Australian Financial Review and Nine News. However, during the Olympics, this daily number of requests increased “four-fold” with “some peaks even higher on some days such as the swimming”, Nine technology director of publishing and enterprise practices Andre Lackmann said. “Across all of those services, we have a 70 percent CDN offload, so about 30 percent of that traffic is ... Read more