Future of Cyber Warfare

Greetings from the 2014 Digital Government Conference in Canberra, where Dr Suresh Hungenahally, Chief Information Security Officer, Department of Business and Innovation (Vic), is speaking on "The Future of Cyber Warfare". He showed a video from the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) depicting a government official who has lost their laptop, so logs in from a cybercafe and has their password stolen as a result.

Dr Hungenahally pointed out that "hackers" are now not just teenager having fun, they are criminals out to steal corporate secrets. He related the Queensland case of a SCADA system being penetrated  the Maroochy Shire Council's sewage control system.
Dr Hungenahally then claimed that the Australian Air Traffic control system depended on US based computer systems, which seems unlikely.

ps: The Australian National University is launching its "Strategy and Statecraft in Cyberspace" research, later today.

A New Dawn in Government Digital Servicing

Greetings from the 2014 Digital Government Conference in Canberra, where Gary Steinberg, CIO, Department of Human Services is speaking on "A New Dawn in Government Digital Servicing". He commented that their student customers are using the new digital channel much more than older customers (which seems reasonable). Use of call, face to face and telephony service channels still account for 40% of the customer access. The department is looking at how to move these customers to the digital service. A new service "Express Connect" will be launched with the customer "in channel". Translating the hype, the customer will use a video conference to communicate with the department, using voice and face recognition to identify the customer. It was claimed this would work with a smart TV set and a smart phone and allow document access. This appears to be designed to replicate a traditional face to face interview to make older customers fee more comfortable. Howevr, the interface also uses what is described as "gaming" technology, with a percentage score indicating how complete the customer's claim is. It will be interesting to see how well this works in practice. It was noted that using the TV as the display would allow the customer to more easily see, than on a small mobile device. This was described as interacting in-channel, in real time.

There would appear to be scope for using this form of wireless soft-docking (I made that term up) for executives who spend all day talking and presenting and never typing. It might also be used for e-learning as well.

The Department intends to use the same interface would be used in people's homes, in offices and in managed care residential facilities. He pointed out that real people don't fit the assumed categories, such as having sixty year old students, with children. Also in ten days time Human Services will be launching a new online service based on "we know who you are", using gaming scores for user friendliness.