ACSC offers optional DNS protection to government entities

The Australian Cyber Security Centre will be offering its Australian Protective Domain Name Service (AUPDNS) for free to other government entities at federal and state level across Australia.

AUPDNS has already inspected 10 billion queries, and blocked 1 million connections to malicious domains, Assistant Minister for Defence Andrew Hastie said on Thursday.

“A single malicious connection could result in a government network being vulnerable to attack or compromise, so it’s vital we do everything we can to prevent cybercriminals from gaining a foothold,” he said.

“Currently AUPDNS is protecting over 200,000 users, and this number is growing”.

The blocklist functionality was developed with Nominet Cyber.

Elsewhere on Thursday, Labor deputy chair of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security — which examines national security legislation and often leads to Labor waving continuous legislation through — Anthony Byrne tended his resignation.

“The work of the PJCIS is crucial to Australia’s national security and its integrity should never be questioned,” Byrne said.

“I have always put the work of this bipartisan Committee first and have always served in its best interests.”

Byrne is in hot water after telling Victoria’s Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission he was involved in branch stacking.

Replacing Byrne to fill the ALP post will be Senator Jenny McAllister, with Peter Khalil appointed to the committee.

“Byrne has served the PJCIS in a number of roles since 2005 including as Chair and Deputy Chair,” Labor leader Anthony Albanese said.

“I thank Mr Byrne for his important contributions to this committee in Australia’s national interest.”

On Wednesday, the Australian government announced a new set of standalone criminal offences for people who use ransomware under what it has labelled its Ransomware Action Plan. 

The plan creates new criminal offences for people that use ransomware to conduct cyber extortion, target critical infrastructure with ransomware, and deal with stolen data knowingly obtained in the course of committing a separate criminal offence, as well as buying or selling malware for the purposes of undertaking computer crimes.

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