The News

Australians are smashing ‘getting hacked’ KPIs

Australia has gotten its yearly reminder that we’re increasingly at risk from cyber attacks (SBS). The Australian Signals Directorate’s annual cyber threat report says that there are rising numbers of cyber attacks for both individuals and the country, and those attacks are more costly and disruptive than ever before (Cyber dot gov). ASD highlighted state-sponsored hackings using routers and smart devices, leading to headlines like Chinese hackers are targeting WFH employees which rocks (AFR, $).

The Sizzle: The most interesting tidbit to me were the two unnamed federal government bodies and bits of critical infrastructure that were categorised as “extensive compromise”. (You know what they were? Hit me up). Also the rising number of critical infrastructures notified of “potential malicious cyber activity over 190 times”. I will say that I have a lot of sympathy for the poor sysadmins and support staff who are dealing with the headaches of figuring out whether users are CCP hackers or just idiot employees trying to sign in via dodgy free Wi-Fi in Yubeng, and then subsequently complaining that they can’t access all their confidential files.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Qantas court order stops service from alerting people whose details have been leaked

Australian national treasure Troy Hunt will not alert Have I Been Pwned users caught up in the Qantas hack because of a court order prohibiting use of the data (Troy Hunt). In July, Qantas successfully sought an interim injunction that prohibits Australians from sharing the airline’s data that has now just been released on the dark web. Unfortunately, these injunctions also affect people who are going to use this data for good — like journalists, security firms and Troy Hunt who runs the Have I Been Pwned service which relies on accessing leaks to inform users who are included.

Hunt points out the problem with these kinds of court orders:

He noted the limited benefit of a court order: they only apply to people in Australia, who abide by the law, and who even know the order exists.

EFTM’s Trevor Long had a similar take:

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

We’re getting a new Wi-Fi standard :)

Move over Wi-Fi 7 — TP-Link has just successfully tested its first ever device using the nascent Wi-Fi 8 standard (Tech Spot). A white paper was released earlier this year for 802.11bn which uses the same GHz bands and data rates — so don’t expect even faster rates — but apparently improves latency and reduces packet loss (TP-Link). While we don’t even have a draft for the actual standards, the improvements on the tech are being sold as good for real world “time-sensitive applications such as gaming, augmented reality, industrial automation, and specialized AI workloads.”

This all sounds great, but I’ll settle for a Wi-Fi 6 mesh set up for my house that doesn’t just freak out by alternating between various nodes with no rhyme or reason.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Leftovers

Australia:

Rest of the world:

Discuss these links in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Oh, Also

Something the Pope said about technology will SHOCK you!

I already knew we had a new Woke Pope but I didn’t realise he was a Poster. Reuters reports that Pope Leo warned of “the degrading practice of so-called click-bait” and preached caution when using artificial intelligence.

Sorry pope, I wasn’t familiar with your game. I feel like I should have known when a few weeks ago our new American pope poured cold water on the idea of making an AI pope (USCCB).

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Bargains

Electrical & electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

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