'Cyber shield' to be key part of $5B Microsoft investment in Australia

What would $5bn buy?

AusCERT 2023 had a few talks that hint towards a focus on "threat intelligence sharing"[1][2] amongst what would seemingly be a combination of government departments and "critical infrastructure" private sector companies (utilities, supply chain, healthcare, ...etc).

Perhaps something along the lines of a modern take on DShield[3] (2000-), RBLs[4] as well as centralised log analysis, etc? The ability to have a central repository of rules such as "File X was created at location Y on host Z and this is highly unusual as files have never before been written to location Y, plus administrators are currently asleep and have not logged into host Z in the past day".

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MTFknX_OYE

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAnsk_xX5JQ

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DShield

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System_blocklist

"It is also pledging to train 300,000 Australians for jobs in cloud computing – based on the processing and storage of information at remote data centres – and artificial intelligence."

An ultimate lock-in. I wonder what those 300K are going to do? Play buttons in Azure?

“Australia is one of the world’s most advanced users of cloud technologies and this investment will keep us at the forefront.”

But it might not be your cloud, you know.