14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft assured the Australian Department of Parliamentary Service that it had nothing to worry about, as the NSA had not installed any backdoor on the Microsoft software suites used by the members of the parliament.
In the wake of the NSA scandal, politicians in Australia feared that they too had been affected by the snooping actions of the United States, especially after it was revealed that the National Security Agency was trying to weaken encryption by building backdoors in a series of widely used tools, ZDNet reports.
The issue started back in November, when Eija Seittenranta, chief information officer of the Australian Department of Parliamentary Services was questioned about the security issues that arose following the NSA revelations.
Since most of the servers run on Microsoft software, she looked at the Australian Signals Directorate for advice on vulnerabilities, only to be redirected towards Microsoft in the end.
“DPS has not been provided with any specific advice that Microsoft products or any other products have been backdoored by foreign intelligence services,” a new statement reads.
“Microsoft has advised DPS that there is no backdoor within the Microsoft suite of products, nor attempted to source information from the parliamentary network or provide information to any other entity,” the message continues.
On one hand, Australia is part of the Five Eyes. The Five Eyes is a pact of five nations (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom and the United States) whose intelligence services collaborate on a regular basis. Furthermore, as it was revealed in the past several months, they also agreed not to spy on each other.
That being said, Australia should not, theoretically, be part of the NSA’s spy list.
On the other hand, however, it was unveiled back in November that the United States actually wanted to secretly spy on Five Eyes’ member states without their knowledge and it sought a way to achieve that particular goal.