The company responsible for rolling out the National Broadband Network across Australia has said it has 109,000 premises leftover following the company hitting the fiscal year 2020 build target that it set.

NBN previously said it would have 100,000 premises left unconnected at the end of its build phase due to needing “bespoke” connections that require a complex installation, are located within culturally significant areas, or are heritage sites.

On Monday, the company said it expects 80% of the leftover premises to be ready to connect this calendar year. Of that 80%, 67,000 are complex builds, and 25,000 are from new developments. NBN also said it would shift 17,000 premises from fixed wireless to fibre to the curb technology.

In its latest set of weekly statistics due June 25 [PDF], NBN said it had just shy of 38,000 premises labelled as not ready to connect in areas declared ready for

Hackers have started launching attacks against F5 BIG-IP networking devices, ZDNet has learned.

Attacks have been spotted today by Rich Warren, a security researcher for the NCC Group.

In an interview earlier today, Warren told ZDNet the attacks are malicious in nature, and hackers are attempting to steal administrator passwords from the hacked devices.

Summary: BIG-IP and CVE-2020-5902

These attacks are targeting BIG-IP, a multi-purpose networking device manufactured by F5 Networks. BIG-IP devices can be configured to work as traffic shaping systems, load balancers, firewalls, access gateways, rate limiters, or SSL middleware.

These devices are some of the most popular networking products in use today, and they are used to underpin some of the largest and sensitive networks around.

BIG-IP devices are used in government networks, on the networks of internet service providers, inside cloud computing data centers, and they’re widely deployed across enterprise networks.

The devices are

F5 Networks, one of the world’s largest provider of enterprise networking gear, has published a security advisory this week warning customers to patch a dangerous security flaw that is very likely to be exploited.

The vulnerability impacts the company’s BIG-IP product. These are multi-purpose networking devices that can work as web traffic shaping systems, load balancers, firewalls, access gateways, rate limiters, or SSL middleware.

BIP-IP is one of the most popular networking products in use today. They are used in government networks all over the globe, on the networks of internet service providers, inside cloud computing data centers, and widely across enterprise networks.

On its website, F5 says its BIG-IP devices are used on the networks of 48 companies included in the Fortune 50 list.

CVE-2020-5902

Tracked as CVE-2020-5902, the BIG-IP bug was found and privately reported to F5 by Mikhail Klyuchnikov, a security researcher at

The amount of electronic waste (e-waste) that was produced globally in 2019 reached a record of 53.6 million tonnes (Mt), up 9.2 Mt in five years, according to the United Nation’s (UN) global e-waste monitor 2020 [PDF].

The UN defines e-waste as any discarded products with a battery or plug, and features toxic and hazardous substances such as mercury, that can pose severe risk to human and environmental health.

According to the report, 17.4 Mt of total e-waste in 2019 comprised of small equipment, while 13 Mt was large equipment, and temperature exchange equipment accounted for nearly 11 Mt. Screens and monitors, small IT and telecommunication equipment, and lamps represented 6.7 Mt, 4.7 Mt, and 0.9 Mt, respectively.

According to the report, Asia was the biggest culprit, generating the greatest volume of e-waste during 2019 of nearly 25 Mt, followed by Americas at 13 Mt, and Europe at 12 Mt.

Social media giant Facebook disclosed on Wednesday a new user privacy incident. The company said that it continued sharing user data with approximately 5,000 developers even after their application’s access expired.

The incident is related to a security control that Facebook added to its systems following the Cambridge Analytica scandal of early 2018.

Responding to criticism that it allowed app developers too much access to user information, Facebook added at the time a new mechanism to its API that prevented apps from accessing a user’s data if the user did not use the app for more than 90 days.

However, Facebook said that it recently discovered that in some instances, this safety mechanism failed to activate and allowed some apps to continue accessing user information even past the 90-day cutoff date.

Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, VP of Platform Partnerships at Facebook, said engineers fixed the issue on the same

Indigenous Business Australia (IBA) has announced the construction of a pair of commercial satellite ground stations in Alice Springs.

Touted as the first development of its kind on Aboriginal owned land in Australia, IBA said the new infrastructure has the potential to reduce the latency for high resolution earth observation imagery down from hours or days, down to minutes.

It said the satellite ground stations will enhance Australia’s capability in disaster management, such as dealing with cyclones and bushfires, as well as aid environmental monitoring, border protection, and search and rescue operations.

IBA, which provided the funding for the construction, said it would also possess strategic uses such as monitoring the economic impacts of pandemics like COVID-19 from space.

The project was built, managed, and owned by Indigenous companies: The Centre for Appropriate Technology (CfAT) and its subsidiaries Ekistica Ltd and CfAT Satellite Enterprises, as well as